A Novel Concept of Production and Assembly Processes Integration

Abstract

Nowadays, companies face more complex parallel devolpment processes due to cost concerns and shortened development cycles paired with an every increasing technical complexity and variety of products. It is often to observe several tasks distributed by different automated equipments, needing to be conveyed from one workstation to another. However, through the integrating of some automated tasks, the overall system life cycle cost can be reduced, as well as the machine start-up time and improve product quality and consistency. This work intends to develop and present the real advantages of processes’ integration using automation, in opposition to a diversity of inter-dependent automated processes, in terms of work preparation (setups), materials flow and maintainability. A case study is presented, illustrating how the system can be designed, establishing a novel concept of a fully automated equipment, integrating production and assembly systems.