## 4 Potentials and Challenges
### Potentials  
As already previously pointed out, the novel bridge crane design concept offers several potentials. The most important include, in particular, manufacturing; however, there are further potentials, such as:  
* Required work area;
* Handling of components;
* Decentralized production;
* Transportation;
* Lightweight design potential.  
These are to be highlighted and explained in the following section as well. A major advantage of the segmented design are the dimensions of the components involved. Compared with conventional cranes, less working space has to be made available for their manufacturing. Furthermore, the design offers the advantage that the individual parts of the crane can be manufactured by conventional largely automated machinery. Another advantage of the smaller dimensions of the components is that they are easier to handle during production. Different processing stations have to be passed, including welding or painting, for example. In conventional systems, the crane bridge is designed as a single part, meaning that in-plant transport between the individual processing stations requires additional conveying equipment (e.g., another bridge crane for handling the loads) and a corresponding infrastructure. Due to the smaller dimensions of the components of the segmented design, transport between the processing stations is less challenging and can be carried out more quickly, for example, by using forklifts. In the conventional case, the entire crane bridge is assembled at one location and must be transported from there to the place of operation. In this context, the possibility of building the crane bridge from individual components made by conventional machinery can be used for decentralized production. This means that the entire crane bridge does not have to be manufactured at one location but by several manufacturers who may be located closer to the place of operation or have available production capacities. The entire process up to the assembly of the crane bridge can thus be faster. Furthermore, it is planned to manufacture the individual sheet metal  
Figure 18: Prototypes of the segmented bridge crane concepts: (**a–c**): Truss design, (**d–f**): Box design.  
elements by laser cutting and edging. In combination with automated welding processes, this is expected to provide the necessary accuracy. The motivation of the alternative approach mentioned at the beginning includes the transport of the individual parts. These are designed so that they can be transported on conventional conveying aids, such as EUR pallets, and loaded onto trucks with the aid of forklifts. This also makes transport to difficult-to-access terrain easier. This includes, for example, mining regions or areas with inadequate transport infrastructure. The applied pretension within the design allows for influence of the resulting stress and the deformation. Using the box section design as an example, optimization algorithms were developed in [26] on the basis of the concept presented in order to determine the geometric dimensions of the profiles so that the overall structure is of minimum weight, taking into account developed constraint functions for the design. A comparison with three reference cranes from [18] indicates that the box section design and the algorithms used have resulted in a weight saving of between 19 % and 22 % compared to the conventional cranes. The truss design tends to be of higher weight at this stage due to the large number of individual parts. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that the two concepts have not yet been finalized; rather, they are the subject of ongoing research activities with a view to improving the mechanical aspects, the associated design strategies, and development of design rules. This also includes detailed investigations on the mechanical behavior considering different load cases in the framework of further FE analyses and real experiments.