BPMN Process Design for Complex Product Development and Production

In automotive development a lot of new power engine concepts were developed. Beneath the combustion engines hybrid drive systems and electric engines were developed. Consumers, public institutions and politics demand alternative drive systems to avoid air pollution, noise and the consumption of oil resources. Therefore electric drive products with innovative technologies were developed additionally. The problem for production plants is to today how these new technologies can be produced additionally to the existing cars with combustion engines. The objective of this paper is to design processes for complex product development with a lot of product variants an production processes which have to produce the complex product variants. The approach is to use BPMN 2.0 (Business Process Modelling Notation) to model the processes between development and production. BPMN 2.0 supports graphical process modelling and executable process modelling. The consequences of complex product development with high alternative drive systems to production lines were analyzed by BPMN models. A further approach is to use the research tool PROCAS (Process Optimization, Control, Analysis and Simulation) to analyze the consequences of high product variants in production. PROCAS use information of existing CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) systems. The concept of PROCAS is to determine how existing plants, production lines and inventories have to be extended.