Within the ramp-up phase of highly automated assembly systems, the planning effort forms a large part of production costs. Due to shortening product lifecycles, changing customer demands, and therefore an increasing number of ramp-up processes, these costs even rise. So assembly systems should reduce these efforts and simultaneously be flexible for quick adaption to changes in products and their variants. A cognitive interaction system in the field of assembly planning systems is developed within the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative production technology for high-wage countries” at RWTH Aachen University which integrates several cognitive capabilities according to human cognition. This approach combines the advantages of automation with the flexibility of humans. In this paper the main principles of the system's core component—the cognitive control unit—are presented to underline its advantages with respect to traditional assembly systems. Based on this, the actual innovation of this paper is the development of key performance indicators. These refer to the ramp-up process as a main objective of such a system is to minimize the planning effort during ramp-up. The KPIs are also designed to show the impact on the main idea of the Cluster of Excellence in resolving the so-called Polylemma of Production. 1. Introduction In this paper, a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) is discussed describing the impact of a cognitive interaction system on the ramp-up period of highly automated assembly systems. The basis is a cognitive interaction system which is designed within a project of the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative production technology for high-wage countries” at RWTH Aachen University with the objective to plan and control an assembly autonomously. The overall objective of the Cluster of Excellence is to ensure the competitive situation of high-wage countries like Germany with respect to high-tech products, particularly in the field of mechanical and plant engineering. Yet these countries are facing increasingly strong competition by low-wage countries. The solution hypothesis derived in the mentioned Cluster of Excellence is seen in the resolution of the so-called Polylemma of Production, for example, by improving the ramp-up process. The contribution of the project “Cognitive Planning and Control System for Production” is the development of a cognitive interaction system. Cognitive interaction systems in general are characterised by two facts. On the one hand, they comprise cognitive capabilities as mentioned before, and, on the other hand,
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