Economic level of detail for assembly planning

In order to be competitive, companies have to reduce their production costs and thus their assembly costs with increasing quality requirements. To achieve this, companies plan their assembly processes as detailed as possible. Simultaneously, because of an expending range of products with numerous variants, small batches and shorter product life cycles, the question arises, to what extent the effort of a detailed planning is still justified. In order to confirm the described practical problem and in order to validate first solution hypotheses on the determination of an economical planning depth of the assembly planning, a preliminary study was conducted at the WZL (Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering) of the RWTH Aachen University. The results of this study are presented in the following paper.