assembly planning

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) combined with a dynamically interconnected assembly system promise high flexibility and transformability to cope with an increasingly dynamic and complex business environment. Existing approaches for planning AGVs operate on a high level of aggregation so that they do not address the transformability of the transport system itself. Therefore, this article introduces a planning approach that explicitly addresses the transformability of the system by planning on component level. The application is demonstrated within a Greenfield project of the worldwide active pump manufacturer WILO SE.

Ensuring healthy, safe and competitive work is a major challenge in industrial production particularly regarding the demographic change in Germany. Especially work systems with a high amount of manual tasks require appropriate solutions. The article discusses the potential of hybrid human-robot work systems in manufacturing focusing assembly tasks.

This article points out the basic concept of „One-Piece-Flow” in the context of facility planning in manufacturing and shows examples of its successful application in assembly. The authors present configuration variants of this concept and they show the important design parameters with their effects on the system performance. While in the 80’s the principle of flow production was used only for large scale production and mass production, there is a new understanding today: the flow principle is also usable with advantages for medium quantity production, especially for assembly operations carried out by manual and by automatic work stations as well.