Planning of the diversity of industrial portfolios - Complexity-based decision making model by means of evolutionary algorithms

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Günther Schuh
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 260647876

The goal of the research project is to develop a complexity based decision making model for planning the portfolio of industrial manufacturers. Thereby corporate goals such as profit- or revenue-maximisation while considering costs and willingness to pay of the customers shall be taken in to account. The object of the research project is subdivided in to two levels. On the one hand industrial product service systems (consisting of technical products and industrial services) and on the other hand industrial portfolios (consisting of the sum of offered product service systems) are regarded. By offering industrial product service systems to their customers companies can nowadays differentiate from their competitors. The complexity of the object of research submits to the variety and diversity of the offered solutions and their interdependency as well as to the market dynamics, which drives companies to continuously adapt the solutions to the customers needs. By means of the developed explanatory model a comprehensive understanding of the effects that variety of the portfolio has firstly on internal processes and resources and therefor secondly on the variety driven costs of the portfolios shall be gained. Based on the explanatory model and existing forecast models for willingness to pay of the customers, a best possible degree of the value of the solutions on the market and the internal caused costs shall be determined in forms of an optimized diversity of industrial portfolios. Due to the huge number of possible alternative solutions for this research problem a heuristic based optimization approach by means of evolutionary algorithms will be employed. By use of a decision making model robust results for the optimized diversity of industrial portfolios shall be selected.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants