A technical concept for plant engineering by simulation-based and logistic-integrated project management

Customized planning, engineering and build-up of factory plants are very complex tasks, where project management contains lots of risks and uncertainties. Existing simulation techniques could help massively to evaluate these uncertainties and achieve improved and at least more robust plans during project management, but are typically not applied in industry, especially at SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises). This paper presents some results of the joint research project simject of the Universities of Paderborn and Kassel, which aims at the development of a demonstrator for a simulation-based and logistic-integrated project planning and scheduling. Based on the researched state-of-the-art, requirements and a planning process are derived and described, as well as a draft of the current technical infrastructure of the intended modular prototype. First plug-ins for project simulation and multi-project optimization are implemented and already show possible benefits for the project management process.