Automation of Electrical Cable Harnesses Testing

TLDR

Industrial robots excel in structured settings but struggle with the complexity of SMEs, where many manual tasks are too intricate for automation, though advances in IT offer new opportunities for adaptable manufacturing solutions. The study investigates the feasibility of automated testing for electric cable harnesses and explores generic strategies to enhance automation adaptability. The authors implemented a modular hardware‑software system and evaluated its performance by testing real cable harnesses. Automated testing significantly outperformed manual operations in cost, productivity, and reliability, indicating its potential to enhance adaptability and reduce costs for other SME automation solutions.

Abstract

Traditional automated systems, such as industrial robots, are applied in well-structured environments, and many automated systems have a limited adaptability to deal with complexity and uncertainty; therefore, the applications of industrial robots in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are very limited. The majority of manual operations in SMEs are too complicated for automation. The rapidly developed information technologies (IT) has brought new opportunities for the automation of manufacturing and assembly processes in the ill-structured environments. Note that an automation solution should be designed to meet the given requirements of the specified application, and it differs from one application to another. In this paper, we look into the feasibility of automated testing for electric cable harnesses, and our focus is on some of the generic strategies for the improvement of the adaptability of automation solutions. Especially, the concept of modularization is adopted in developing hardware and software to maximize system adaptability in testing a wide scope of products. A proposed system has been implemented, and the system performances have been evaluated by executing tests on actual products. The testing experiments have shown that the automated system outperformed manual operations greatly in terms of cost-saving, productivity and reliability. Due to the potential of increasing system adaptability and cost reduction, the presented work has its theoretical and practical significance for an extension for other automation solutions in SMEs.