Worker assistance systems and assembly process maturity in the prototype and pre-series production

Abstract

In order to minimize time-to-market, the development and planning of automotive assembly processes needs to be conducted in early product development stages under high uncertainty, with frequent changes and increasing time and cost pressure. Nonetheless, the resulting processes at the time of handover to the series production need to be mature, thoroughly tested and optimized to minimize problems and delays in the ramp-up. Recently, assistance systems for the manual assembly have received extensive attention in research and practice. However, they were almost exclusively applied to the series production, while little regard was dedicated to the potential such systems can offer for development and planning. Therefore, this paper presents an approach to leverage worker assistance systems for the assembly process development and evaluation during the prototype assembly in series development. A general approach and design for such a system is described and observations from a company are presented where a corresponding solution was piloted.