Towards Product-Production-CoDesign for the Production of the Future

The individualization of customer demand combined with increased customer requirements is leading to more complex and diverse products with an increasing frequency of product development. As a consequence, manufacturing companies must maximize efficiency in the design and planning of products and production systems. Here, Product-Production-CoDesign (PPCD) describes an approach to integrated product and production engineering across generations and life cycles. In today's world of global pandemics, volatile markets and supply chain turbulences as well as a shortage in material supply and skilled workers, global manufacturing must adapt and an integrative PPCD is becoming increasingly important. Against this background, this article aims at contributing to addressing these challenges by describing a production of the future based on the principles of PPCD. To that end, a vision of the production of the future is illustrated as a target state. Then, the tools and methods of PPCD are fleshed out to describe how to achieve this target state and overcome potential obstacles during product and production design. Finally, several case studies are presented to show how aspects of PPCD can be implemented step by step to move real-world manufacturing towards the production of the future.