assembly

Short product lifecycles, customer-specific products and high flexibility: Producing companies are facing the challenge that their production systems must meet constantly increasing requirements. Traditional, static interlinked production systems are increasingly reaching their limits. There is a need for a new form of assembly organization, the so-called dynamically interconnected assembly.

The requirements of industrial production have drastically changed in the past. Mass production has been the predominant approach for decades, but there is a growing demand for individualized goods. In particular, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) deal with small lot sizes and even single-item production. These companies have very demanding requirements for robot deployment. Programming robots must be time efficient and not require specific expertise in robotics, so that shop floor workers can use them. In this article, we introduce a knowledge-based approach to address these issues.

The European automotive industry can be characterized by its multi-variant products resulting in complex production planning problems. Often separate systems are used to plan personnel capacity and production programmes. Usually human-resource allocation planning is done very inefficiently and independently from actual capacity requirements. This causes imbalances in the form of idle workers or overloaded workstations. This paper describes an approach for the integration of human resource allocation and production planning into one common planning platform in order to utilise existing optimisation potential. It will further describe the impact of the solution on flexibility and mutability of assembly lines.

The Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries”, funded by the German Research Foundation, at the RWTH Aachen University develops solutions to improve the competitiveness of production in Germany. In the future, production systems should be capable of independently adapting to new conditions as a result of the development of cognitive controls, e.g., for robot-aided assembly processes. The tasks of the human operator will thereby focus primarily on system monitoring and direct cooperation with robots. Based on the new requirements regarding this cognitive system, one focus is the development of an ergonomic human-machine-interface.

Since assembly represents the last stage of the production process before the finished parts are delivered to the end user, it poses high demands on flexibility. By offering service-based business models, producers of assembly systems can support their customers and contribute to a productive and highly flexible assembly process. Particularly deployment of temporary workers conduces to a high level of flexibility. Nevertheless, before implementing a new business concept, advantages and disadvantages of employing temporary workers need to be compared to benefits and drawbacks of the allocation of permanent employees. This article offers decision support for producers of assembly systems and for their customers as well.

Assembly processes are characterized by increasing complexity. Fast ramp-up is a question of vital importance due to the high invests for production lines. A key factor to success is the integrated reuse of experience concerning similar machines and processes. In many cases experiences from shop floor level remain unused in new projects. A main obstacle on production level is to identify and record experience rapidly and precisely. This concept was developed on the base of the Delphi-Method to process experiences of employees effectively and efficiently.

Turbulent business environments force enterprises to ever faster answers and adaptions in order to secure their competitive ability. Mutability and responseability as crucial success factors are based finally on knowledge, which must be continuously improved and renewed. The article shows starting points and how ontology based knowledge management can be used purposefully for the increase of the mutability in and by enterprises and in particular in the assembly.

To an increasing degree process stability and documentation gain in importance on manual workstations because of the demand to lot size 1 and the duty of flexibility. To ensure efficiency increase regarding to harder quality guidelines, the flow of information to the worker and back have to be optimised and realised resistant against failures and information loss. The use of multi-medial, IT-based worker information systems to assist workers conducting their tasks and to enable a backflow of relevant information like quality data, waste quantities etc. with current technical methods offers a possible solution.