The agent-based control system of Production 2000+ has been a great success from a technical and technological point of view. It has performed well in industrial practice and it has lived up to all its technical promises!
In spite of the very successful deployment of the prototype, however, Mercedes-Benz has not installed a second P2000+ system. At first glance, this seems to be a contradiction. In the following, we will analyze why this is actually no contradiction at all (cf. [Schild 2007]).
The performance test in 1999 already showed that the agent-based control system is able to constantly handle a heavy production load and that in doing so it achieves a much better performance than transfer lines (about 20% higher throughput). These findings were confirmed in the day-to-day operation of the prototype over the following five years. The prototype was operated as part of the normal production and performed its job without any major complaints.
Moreover, the prototype was able to demonstrate that it is truly able to process different products on the same line in a flexible manner. Several times different products had to be processed by the prototype in order to reduce a shortage of these parts on other manufacturing lines.
From a technical point of view, the prototype has thus demonstrated two important points:
On the other hand, P2000+ has not experienced a wide-spread adoption within Mercedes-Benz. One reason for this is that a technical advantage is not necessarily an economic advantage, or, more precisely, an economically measurable advantage. Apart from the robustness of the system and the higher productivity resulting from this, the main advantage of the P2000+ system is its enormous flexibility with respect to changes (of products or manufacturing processes). Flexibility, however, is a future advantage which requires an immediate investment. The company must invest today in order to be prepared for upcoming changes. From an economic point of view, there are definitive costs today for the installation of the flexibility, but only potential benefits if the production system will be used in unexpected ways in the future. As a consequence, if the investment costs for the flexibility are higher than the increase of the productivity which can be immediately achieved, this is a weak business case. At the end of the day, investing into flexibility is thus a management decision. You must be convinced that you require the flexibility - you cannot prove it. Usually, the management is convinced that it requires the flexibility if it has gone through bad experience in the past. But Production 2000+ was trying to address an up-coming challenge, not past problems.
Another aspect is that there are always technical alternatives, and this is also true for the P2000+ system. There seems to be no real alternative if one requires maximum flexibility: The P2000+ system is able to process nearly any kind of product (without changing the equipment). At an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) like Mercedes-Benz, however, no more than two or three major product variants are ever produced simultaneously on a single line; thus, limited flexibility will often be sufficient. For such cases, there are nowadays alternatives. Let us just mention gantry loading systems which do not require an agent-based control system. Gantry loading have a gripper that grabs a workpiece and moves it overhead to the goal machine. This technique makes it possible to supply several parallel machines with a single gantry loader and thus to achieve the same robustness with respect to machine failures as P2000+. Of course, this approach is less flexible as the gripper is only able to grab a small range of products. Overall, this alternative, as most other alternatives, provides very limited flexibility, but achieves comparable productivity gains without requiring a transportation system as costly as the one of P2000+. In fact, nearly all manufacturing systems that Mercedes-Benz has installed since the project P2000+ are of this type (at least up to 2003).
The bottom line is that agent technology is technically very attractive and, as in the case of P2000+, can be very successful; however, in order to become a widespread application technology it is necessary to more closely look at the business aspects of the technology, in particular whether it creates a truly economic benefit. P2000+ did improve the overall throughput. However, alternative manufacturing systems such as the gantry loading systems do so too, but at less investment costs (on the other hand, with no or very limited flexibility). The real advantage of the agent-based approach is thus flexibility, which is difficult to measure and sometimes not fully required.
Of course, this assessment is strongly biased towards the automotive industry. In different industries, the same system may have a quite different economic impact. But the experience of P2000+ suggests that, in general, research projects should consider right from the beginning - honestly and realistically - how a new technology will fit into the overall industrial landscape and what its business advantages will be at the end of the day.