Procedure for Defining the System of Objectives in the Initial Phase of an Industry 4.0 Project Focusing on Intelligent Quality Control Systems

Industry 4.0 describes the fourth industrial revolution, which leads to an intelligent, connected and decentralized production. A core aspect is a continuous communication between humans, machines and products during the production process enabled by cyber physical production systems (CPPS). The overall aim is to increase cost- and time-efficiency, and improve product quality, which requires a broad understanding of the enabling technologies as well as methods and tools. Within this paper, one production process (spring coiling) with three different involved value adding companies is analyzed to identify quality related production issues that shall be addressed with an intelligent condition monitoring based quality control system. The research addresses both machine related and organizational process analysis. Therefore, a comprehensive descriptive model has been developed to represent the relevant systems, their interfaces, interdependencies and influence parameters. This paper presents the procedure to develop the descriptive model, including other generated documents to define the system of objectives incorporating the technical and the value adding partners’ requirements.