Due to higher degrees of individualization, shorter product life cycles, and volatile selling markets, fulfilling customer demands -- the main task of automotive companies -- has become very complex. In order to tackle this complexity, new concepts that enable the decentralization of decision-making within the production process have become promising solutions. The advancement towards self-organized production requires novel approaches in the field of production program planning. This work introduces the concept of thevolume cycleas a new design factor in program planning. Additionally, a novel method to identify flexibility potentials in production sequences based on ,flexibility graphsis proposed, and the method is validated through a case study considering a segment of the assembly process for an automobile. Suitable visualization techniques for flexibility graphs are also discussed. Furthermore, in order to allow automatic analysis and evaluation of the flexibility potentials, methods of graph mining are introduced and the application possibilities of these techniques in terms of analyzing flexibility graphs are clarified. The results obtained from the case study illustrate that routing flexibility is not leveraged in today’s production lines, thus revealing a potential optimization domain.

Global Sourcing adds to a company's value by realizing the best prices on a global market and making new markets accessible. However, increasing global orientation of the companies is associated with new challenges in planning and controlling the network processes to obtain a high service level and a guaranteed availability of supply goods. Order-to-Delivery Network simulation (OTD-NET) offers a simulation based approach for gaining insight in global networks. The OTD-NET suite provides services for modelling, simulating and analyzing complete logistic networks including the specifics of the different network participants like suppliers or producers. With the specialized automotive edition, OTD-NET enables a precise specification of complex products considering its configuration, bill of materials and supports an easy analysis of various network strategies like network design, structure and process concepts, supply strategies as well as different production strategies. OTD-NET is developed by Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics in Dortmund (Germany). Within the paper OTD-NET is presented and exemplarily demonstrated by a joint project with Volkswagen. 1 439 978-1-4799-3950-3/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE Liebler, Beissert, Motta, and Wagenitzcy and competitiveness depend essentially on a company's ability to purposefully restructure existing processes and organizational structures based on a detailed evaluation of the current status and forecasts of future demands. Hence, it is becoming more and more important to simulate the company or network processes and to evaluate it under a variety of perspectives. A thorough approach to planning and control of value-adding processes across the entire value network is needed to remain competitive and expand existing benefits of a network structure (Arnold et al 2008). The objective of such an approach is• continuous optimization of existing processes and structures through the analysis and evaluation of strategy, structure and process alternatives. • constant improvement of relevant performance and cost characteristics of the production and logistics network like on-time delivery, reduction of stocks and thereby implied costs and shorter lead and delivery times. Looking at the automotive industry, requirements for an adequate planning system to handle complex supply chain network can be derived. Automotive industry is characterized by a broad production network with various participants involved like original equipments manufacturer (OEM), suppliers as well as various logistic service providers to execute transports between the supply chain partners. The automotive industry is characterized by a high product variety; German premium brands in particular offer a wide variety of customer configurable options. Almost every aspect of the car's interior and exterior may be changed or adapted. Meyr (2004) states that cars are available in more than 1030 variants (Meyr 2004). Therefore the number of customer configured build-to-order (BTO) cars increases. On the other hand...

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