Automation, Digitalization, and Changes in Occupational Structures in the Automobile Industry in Germany, the United States, and Japan: A Brief History from the Early 1990s Until 2018

In the current public discussion, it is considered certain that we are living in a time of rapidly advancing automation, which is driven in particular by the use of robots. Accordingly, many academic publications use robot density as the central indicator of automation. The present study challenges this perspective. It examines two central questions: First, what approaches to automation and digitalization have been pursued in the automotive industry in Germany, Japan and the USA? Second, how have employment and its occupational composition in the automotive industry developed in the three countries? The first part of the study focuses on the development of automation and digitalization approaches in the automotive industry from the early 1990s until today. It combines a qualitative analysis of press articles and a quantitative evaluation of the development of the stock of industrial robots from 1993 to 2018 based on the statistics of the International Federation of Robotics. The second part of the study focuses on the change in employment structures using occupational statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (USA), the Federal Employment Agency (Germany) and the Statistics Bureau of Japan. The study questions the perception of an automation-related threat to employment and especially to production employment. At the same time, it discusses developments in Germany, Japan and the USA in comparison and highlights differences in automation and digitalization approaches as well as different paths of change in employment structures

Technology adoption and the organization of production. The case of digital production technologies

open1noopenguendalina anzolinAnzolin, GUENDALINA MARI

Strategic supply chain management implications of an unregulated BREXIT

Due to the integrated, complex and long supply chain structure of the automotive industry and the large size of cross-border trade of components and cars between UK´s and EU´s automotive supply chain actors, the implementation of a tariff scheme and custom handling procedures in the event of an unregulated (hard) BREXIT by March 2019 negatively affects the industry. The fundamental Four Freedoms are hindered resulting in an increase of sourcing costs. Assembly parts and distribution of final cars becomes costlier. The crucial JIT (just-in-time) philosophy is jeopardized due to the requirement of safety stock and custom checks. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a case study providing students with an effective way to apply Strategic- and Supply Chain Management (SCM) concepts based on a real case scenario of automobile industry (BMW). Professors are provided with resolution documents to effectively assess students’ solutions. A deductive approach was adopted in which the causal relationship between a hard BREXIT and strategic SCM implications is elaborated. A qualitative exploratory method was adopted, and the nature of the collected data is primarily qualitative, but also entails quantitative elements. Data was retrieved from scientific articles, industry specific reports, company reports, interviews and documentation from BMW. A hard BREXIT presents great challenges for BMW and their suppliers. BMW should foster cooperation with suppliers and engage in more backward integration policies to secure supply of strategic components and avoid supply stops. Supply network flexibility is crucial to maintain a sustained competitive SC. To offset trade barrier costs, BMW should partially shift MINI and eMINI production from the UK to other suitable European countries such as Hungary or the Netherlands and the company should aim towards more local sourcing in the UK for more standardized components

Q'@gile: quantum agile manufacture of internal combustion engines

Current trends in the automotive industry towards fuel efficient and low emission vehicles, are dictated by more environmental friendly customers, more strict environmental legislation, rising fuel costs and intensive competition. These factors are pressuring vehicle manufacturers to speed up R&D and improve the efficiency and flexibility of their manufacturing operations so that improved products can be introduced over shortened timeframes. Recent advances have been focused on improving the design of internal combustion engines, coupled with research into alternative fuels and related new forms of vehicle propulsion. Natural impacts of these advances have been shorter engine lifetimes, increased pace of engine innovations, and significant changes in propulsion type share: in Europe the diesel engine share is increasing relative to that of petrol engines while in the US and Japan hybrids are becoming popular. In the long-term fuel cell- and hydrogen-fuelled vehicles may largely make internal combustion engines obsolete. [Continues.

A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for ROS using Ontological Semantics

This paper presents a novel ontology-driven software engineering approach for the development of industrial robotics control software. It introduces the ReApp architecture that synthesizes model-driven engineering with semantic technologies to facilitate the development and reuse of ROS-based components and applications. In ReApp, we show how different ontological classification systems for hardware, software, and capabilities help developers in discovering suitable software components for their tasks and in applying them correctly. The proposed model-driven tooling enables developers to work at higher abstraction levels and fosters automatic code generation. It is underpinned by ontologies to minimize discontinuities in the development workflow, with an integrated development environment presenting a seamless interface to the user. First results show the viability and synergy of the selected approach when searching for or developing software with reuse in mind.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2015 (arXiv:1601.00877), Stefan Zander, Georg Heppner, Georg Neugschwandtner, Ramez Awad, Marc Essinger and Nadia Ahmed: A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for ROS using Ontological Semantic

Development of an autonomous mobile towing vehicle for logistic tasks

Frequently carrying high loads and performing repetitive tasks compromises the ergonomics of individuals, a recurrent scenario in hospital environments. In this paper, we design a logistic planner of a fleet of autonomous mobile robots for the automation of transporting trolleys around the hospital, which is independent of the space configuration, and robust to loss of network and deadlocks. Our robotic solution has an innovative gripping system capable of grasping and pulling nonmodified standard trolleys just by coupling a plate. Robots are able to navigate autonomously, to avoid obstacles assuring the safety of operators, to identify and dock a trolley, to access charging stations and elevators, and to communicate with the latter. An interface was built allowing users to command the robots through a web server. It is shown how the proposed methodology behaves in experiments conducted at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porta and Braga's Hospital.This work is financed by the ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation- COMPETE 2020 Programme, and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project SAICTPAC/0034/2015 - POCI-01- 0145-FEDER-016418. Authors would like to acknowledge to Trivalor, Itau and Gertal for the support of the project RDH.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio