Abstract
Germany has maintained its position as one of the leading countries in terms of technology and constantly expands through targeted innovation policy and the promotion of education and research. In the future, a number of trends and paradigm shifts will have a significant impact on society, but also the production landscape in Germany will change. Examples of these trends are the increase in the tertiary service sector, demographic change and an aging population, an increasing digitization, a shortage of raw materials and energy resources, a clear shift of individual mobility and a growing awareness of environmental and sustainability of consumers and producers. The actual trends towards sustainability suggests that the logistics costs in the near future will rise due to rising energy prices and political sanctions to limit the global transport volumes and thus a central production and subsequent distribution of goods becomes always difficult. At the same time, the trend towards individual customer requirements helps that products need to be produced or finalized very often in the region of customers. It is therefore important in the future not only to design agile and energy- efficient factory structures and production systems, but also to design organizational solutions for decentralized production systems to work to the competitiveness of the German industry in the 21st Century. The presented chapter shows various scenarios and possible solutions for the creation of networks for decentralized and geographically distributed production systems in the German industrial landscape.