Research Article

Digitalization of automotive industry – scenarios for future manufacturing

¹ Institute of Production Science (wbk), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
² Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 02139 Cambridge, MA, USA

^* Corresponding author: steven.sp.peters@outlook.com

Received: 24 July 2015
Accepted: 6 November 2015

Abstract

Among the current challenges to the global automotive industry are changes in global markets leading to product variety, regulation leading to pressure for new technologies in body and powertrain, and competition by new players such as huge information and communication technology companies. Automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) deal with these issues in different ways. This paper uses the scenario technique to illustrate possible answers to the question, how future value chains of automotive industry will look like. In almost all cases, information and communication technology (ICT) plays a major role in future strategies to cope with the aforementioned challenges. On the one hand, ICT can boost the way to more efficient production of variants by utilizing smart manufacturing approaches, on the other hand ICT enables new features such as autonomous driving.