New Methods and Tools for Commissioning of Manufacturing Lines with Robots

Abstract

Since manufacturing lines with robots are widely used in the automotive industry, aspects of this industrial sector are addressed. Car makers including their suppliers are confronted with a tremendous world-wide competition, even extended by additional competitors emerging in the last years. To meet this challenge, some key figures in car production must be dramatically changed. These figures are related to the time to market, production loss for new models, reliability and launching flexibility. Additionally, these changes must lead to an improvement in quality. Eventually an overall cost reduction of 30%–50%, a 50% reduction in the number of work hours per year accomplished by a company related to the number of cars produced, and a decrease in market lead time from 6–8 years to at least 3–4 years should be reached. A further important point is to decrease the commissioning time of manufacturing systems from 6–8 weeks to 48 hours, which in fact means one weekend. This last point saves not only cost, but tremendously increases the launching flexibility, i.e. bringing a new car on the market when the market requires it and not only after the factory vacations. This contribution mainly deals with this last aspect from a technical point of view. All necessary tasks for changing the manufacturing system for new car models should be done in parallel to the running production. Thereby, one important factor is the programming of manufacturing lines with robots. Programming of robots in parallel to the running production can only be done if simulation and off-line programming techniques and systems (SOP) are used.