Paper Title
Enabling Industry 4.0 Through Plm For Production Equipment Development

Abstract
Short product life cycles lead to accelerated product development processes as well as they put pressure on the ramp-up and design of production equipment and fixtures. The Rapid Fixture concept aims to accelerate those downstream processes of retail product development by an automated design approach for production equipment. This paper displays the need for a consistent production equipment lifecycle management and outlines its enablers and components. Furthermore, the paper emphasizes requirements concerning the return of knowledge from a production equipment�s lifecycle to enable a learning process which improves the quality of production equipment, accelerates future ramp-ups and, in the long run, enables Industry 4.0 concepts such as self-configuring factories. Index Terms- Rapid fixture; fixture planning; production equipment lifecycle management.