A new methodology to analyze the functional and physical architecture of existing products for an assembly oriented product family identification FlexARobOS: A modern approach for flexible automation of machine tools FlexARobOS: A modern approach for flexible automation of machine tools

In today’s business environment, the trend towards more product variety and customization is unbroken. Due to this development, the need of agile and reconfigurable production systems emerged to cope with various products and product families. To design and optimize production systems as well as to choose the optimal product matches, product analysis methods are needed. Indeed, most of the known methods aim to analyze a product or one product family on the physical level. Different product families, however, may differ largely in terms of the number and nature of components. This fact impedes an efficient comparison and choice of appropriate product family combinations for the production system. A new methodology is proposed to analyze existing products in view of their functional and physical architecture. The aim is to cluster these products in new assembly oriented product families for the optimization of existing assembly lines and the creation of future reconfigurable assembly systems. Based on Datum Flow Chain, the physical structure of the products is analyzed. Functional subassemblies are identified, and a functional analysis is performed. Moreover, a hybrid functional and physical architecture graph (HyFPAG) is the output which depicts the similarity between product families by providing design support to both, production system planners and product designers. An illustrative example of a nail-clipper is used to explain the proposed methodology. An industrial case study on two product families of steering columns of thyssenkrupp Presta France is then carried out to give a first industrial evaluation of the proposed approach. Abstract The current level of automation in machine tool feeding in SMEs is very low. Reason for this is the low number of parts with a simultaneously high number of variants. As a result, there is a high demand for flexible solution, which can be used with di ff erent machine tools depending on the current workload. In this paper a concept is presented which shows how an intelligent integration of CAD files can simplify the commissioning and programming processes of a robot and enable SMEs to automate the machine loading process. The developed concept was subsequently evaluated using a real use case scenario. Abstract The current level of automation in machine tool feeding in SMEs is very low. Reason for this is the low number of parts with a simultaneously high number of variants. As a result, there is a high demand for flexible solution, which can be used with di ff erent machine tools depending on the current workload. In this paper a concept is presented which shows how an intelligent integration of CAD files can simplify the commissioning and programming processes of a robot and enable SMEs to automate the machine loading process. The developed concept was subsequently evaluated using a real use case scenario. / ) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 54th CIRP Conference on Manufacturing System.