Cyber Physical Systems for Life Cycle Continuous Technical Documentation of Manufacturing Facilities

Continuous rising of requirements to create technical documentation results in high effort in terms of time and costs to create a complete and up to date documentation for manufacturers. In case of any technical modifications of machines the technical documentation also has to be updated. In fact these updates are lacking in most cases. In this paper, the authors propose a methodology for a self-organized creation of technical documentation to enable an up to date state throughout the Product Life Cycle. A complete and up to date technical documentation provides benefits to customers as well as suppliers of manufacturing facilities. The new approach is based on integration and communication of all components and modules such as machine tool, transportation and handling technology etc. via Cyber Physical Systems. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.