Robotic assembly of wire harnesses: Economic and technical justification

Abstract

Market requirements are constantly changing, for the manufacturing industry which results in a volatile environment that poses specific requirements to maintain successful future operations. An important concept to cope with these uncertain requirements is changeability. Over the recent years, specific production systems like the Fluid Manufacturing System (FLMS), were developed which promise to support the required changeability. Previous concepts mainly consider the technical aspects of the production system and not the order management processes. To enable the desired changeability, an order management system covering the production planning, control and monitoring of all activities along the end-to-end value chain from customer inquiry to shipment is needed. In addition to order management, planning and control of logistic processes are affected by the increase of flexibility through FLMS as well, which is also often neglected in changeable production systems such as order management. This paper investigates the impact of changeable production systems onto the order management and logistics. The FLMS forms a respective use case, to identify the required changes within the order management approach. This paper shows that the most significant changes compared to traditional production systems concern production planning and control. Production planning as a static process requires discrete-event production planning results from technological, capacity, economic, social and material flow perspectives. To exploit the degrees of freedom of FLMS, production control is based on a dynamic basis, based on real-time information through Asset Administration Shell (AAS). The main change in logistics is that in FLMS, logistics has the same status as manufacturing. Logistics serves as the interface between order management (digital world) and production (physical world).