Holistic Approach for Jointly Designing Dematerialized Machine Tools and Production Systems Enabling Flexibility-Oriented Business Models

Machine tools and production systems are traditionally designed in two separate stages, thus severely penalize the possibility to match customer production requirements. This work introduces the concept of dematerialization for machine tools and systems whose design principles answer to energy savings and cutting edge performance requirements across their lifecycles. The proposed approach consists of four main steps: new business total-life cycle services, design of dematerialized machine tools, process planning and configuration of production system solutions. The benefits coming from the adoption of machine and system dematerialization strategy have been addressed with reference to an industrial case study.