Commercial Applications of Ubiquitous-Computing Technologies

Goal of the project "Auto-RFID Kanban - automatic control of the flow of materials in production by means of RFID" is the development and evaluation of an RFID-based, new coordination mechanism to make the sequencing in Kanban more flexible.

Kanban represents an efficient form of designing the production logic. Studies show that with the introduction of Kanban, for example, a reduction of the inventory up to 50% and a reduction of the processing time up to 40% is possible. A transfer of the Kanban method - originally developed for the single product manufacturing - to the more realistic multi product manufacturing can only be solved in a suboptimal way so far, as the Kanban-typical first-come-first-served principle for the sequencing leads to unsatisfying results. The project "RFID Kanban" is concerned with this problem. By means of an RFID-based, new coordination mechanism for the sequencing, it should be possible to decide on the sequencing, based on several (even conflicting) target values. Thus, it should be possible to have a more flexible sequencing with regard to economic goals, resulting in cost reductions (f.ex. lower pre-production costs) as well as improvements in the way a goal is reached (f.ex. better adherence of delivery dates) in Kanban-based production control systems.

In the project, the needs of small and medium-sized companies (KMU) are taken into account by identifying production processes in conjunction with medium-sized industry partners and modeling their requirements and workflow. The optimal design of logistic processes is especially important for KMU in order to reduce the higher production costs resulting from disadvantages in economies of scale. Thereby, possible competitive disadvantages in comparision to big companies can be prevented.