Prediction of Defect Propensity for the Manual Assembly of Automotive Electrical Connectors

Assembly for automotive production represents a significant proportion of total manufacturing cost, manufacturing time, and overall product cost. Humans remain a cost effective solution to adapt to the requirements of increasing product complexity and variety present in today\u27s flexible manufacturing systems. The human element present in the manufacturing system necessitates a better understanding of the human role in manufacturing complexity. Presented herein is a framework for enumerating assembly variables correlated with the potential for quality defect, presented in the design, process, and human factors domain. A case study is offered that illustrates on a manual assembly process the effect that complexity variables have on assembly quality

HOW CHANGES IN COGNITIVE AUTOMATION CAN AFFECT OPERATOR PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY

To predict system performance, understanding what affects operator performance and productivity is important. This notion was tested in a LEGO experiment including 40 students. After introducing changes in assembly instructions and material fa\ue7ade operator performance and productivity was increased. The aggregated results gave an indication of how cognitive automation affects the operators’ initial assembly performance. Industrial studies are needed to ensure observed trends and to further study the impact of cognitive automation characteristics. The trends however point toward that cognitive support has an impact on the final assembly and it is therefore possible to achieve better operator performance if instructions and material fa\ue7ade are improved

HOW CHANGES IN COGNITIVE AUTOMATION CAN AFFECT OPERATOR PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY

To predict system performance, understanding what affects operator performance and productivity is important. This notion was tested in a LEGO experiment including 40 students. After introducing changes in assembly instructions and material fa\ue7ade operator performance and productivity was increased. The aggregated results gave an indication of how cognitive automation affects the operators’ initial assembly performance. Industrial studies are needed to ensure observed trends and to further study the impact of cognitive automation characteristics. The trends however point toward that cognitive support has an impact on the final assembly and it is therefore possible to achieve better operator performance if instructions and material fa\ue7ade are improved

Sustainable Living Factories for Next Generation Manufacturing

To be profitable and to generate sustainable value for all stakeholders, next generation manufacturers must develop capabilities to rapidly and economically respond to changing market needs while at the same time minimizing adverse impacts on the environment and benefiting society. 6R-based (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover, Redesign and Remanufacturing) sustainable manufacturing practices enable closed-loop and multi-life cycle material flow; they facilitate producing more sustainable products using manufacturing processes and systems that are more sustainable. Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) and its characteristics of scalability, convertibility, diagnosability, customization, modularity and integrability have emerged as a basis for living factories for next generation manufacturing that can significantly enhance the system sustainability by quickly adjusting system configuration and production processes to meet the market needs, and maintain the system values for generations of products. This paper examines the significance of developing such next generation manufacturing systems as the basis for futuristic sustainable living factories by adapting, integrating and implementing the RMS characteristics with the principles of sustainable manufacturing to achieve value creation for all stakeholders

Hydrogen fuel cell pick and place assembly systems : heuristic evaluation of reconfigurability and suitability

Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFCs) offer numerous advantages over combustion technology but they remain economically uncompetitive except for in niche applications. A portion of this cost is attributed to a lack of assembly expertise and the associated risks. To solve this problem, this research investigates the assembly systems that do exist for this product and systematically decomposes them into their constituent components to evaluate reconfigurability and suitability to product. A novel method and set of criteria are used for evaluation taking inspiration from heuristic approaches for evaluating manufacturing system complexity. It is proposed that this can be used as a support tool at the design stage to meet the needs of the product while having the capability to accept potential design changes and variants for products beyond the case study presented in this work. It is hoped this work develops a new means to support in the design of reconfigurable systems and form the foundation for fuel cell assembly best practice, allowing this technology to reduce in cost and find its way into a commercial space

A multi-agent architecture for plug and produce on an industrial assembly platform

YesModern manufacturing companies face increased pressures to adapt to shorter product life cycles and the need to reconfigure more frequently their production systems to offer new product variants. This paper proposes a new multi-agent architecture utilising “plug and produce” principles for configuration and reconfiguration of production systems with minimum human intervention. A new decision-making approach for system reconfiguration based on tasks re-allocation is presented using goal driven methods. The application of the proposed architecture is described with a number of architectural views and its deployment is illustrated using a validation scenario implemented on an industrial assembly platform. The proposed methodology provides an innovative application of a multi-agent control environment and architecture with the objective of significantly reducing the time for deployment and ramp-up of small footprint assembly systems.The reported research has been part of the EU FP7 research project “PRIME

Generic Design Methodology for Smart Manufacturing Systems From a Practical Perspective. Part II—Systematic Designs of Smart Manufacturing Systems

In a traditional system paradigm, an enterprise reference model provides the guide for practitioners to select manufacturing elements, configure elements into a manufacturing system, and model system options for evaluation and comparison of system solutions against given performance metrics. However, a smart manufacturing system aims to reconfigure different systems in achieving high-level smartness in its system lifecycle; moreover, each smart system is customized in terms of the constraints of manufacturing resources and the prioritized performance metrics to achieve system smartness. Few works were found on the development of systematic methodologies for the design of smart manufacturing systems. The novel contributions of the presented work are at two aspects: (1) unified definitions of digital functional elements and manufacturing systems have been proposed; they are generalized to have all digitized characteristics and they are customizable to any manufacturing system with specified manufacturing resources and goals of smartness and (2) a systematic design methodology has been proposed; it can serve as the guide for designs of smart manufacturing systems in specified applications. The presented work consists of two separated parts. In the first part of paper, a simplified definition of smart manufacturing (SM) is proposed to unify the diversified expectations and a newly developed concept digital triad (DT-II) is adopted to define a generic reference model to represent essential features of smart manufacturing systems. In the second part of the paper, the axiomatic design theory (ADT) is adopted and expanded as the generic design methodology for design, analysis, and assessment of smart manufacturing systems. Three case studies are reviewed to illustrate the applications of the proposed methodology, and the future research directions towards smart manufacturing are discussed as a summary in the second part

Lightweight robust behavior industrial agent methodology

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresAssembly systems today face significant pressure to provide highly adaptable and quickly deployable solutions in order to deal with unpredictable changes according to market trends. However, control of assembly processes are dominated by the use of Programmable Logical Controllers (PLC) which do not provide the necessary mechanisms to easily deal with these challenges. The concept of agent-based control has been introduced as a solution to deal these challenges and support new production paradigms based on the plug and produce concept. However, this solution has not yet been proven to be a real alternative to the traditional PLC approach in terms of performance. This work is investigating the use an approach that is able to benefit from the relative advantages of both PLC and agents solutions. A new hybrid architecture is presented which combines the functionalities of a PLC with those of industrial agents. The focus is on assessing the performance of this approach and help change the minds of an industry averse to changes