Fraunhofer Group for Production
Fraunhofer Group for Production

Components to Distributed Workstations

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      To increase technical flexibility and to map a variety of product, manufacturing resources are enabled to the "Automation of Automation".

      The diversity of variants in the process is achieved by integrating the SWAP-IT architecture to increase organizational flexibility and optimize utilization. Flexible chaining of workstations via freely navigating driverless transport vehicles enables an order-specific material flow. AI-supported optimization algorithms can be used to optimally distribute the workload among the production resources in order to realize a low turnaround time. This makes it possible to implement highly flexible production systems that manufacture customized products of the highest quality in a cost-efficient and sustainable manner.

      Current situation and challenges

      • High-mix low-volume poses major challenges for classic production architectures
      • Limited flexibility with stiff process chains
      • High effort and costs for switching to new product variants and process validation

      Our goal

      • Automatic reconfiguration of processes for new product variants
      • Components are moved to fixed production islands by a swarm of autonomous, mobile transport robots in a self-organized, dynamic and workload-optimized manner

      Our vision

      • Autonomously planning manufacturing
      • Networking of manufacturing equipment via AGVs and thus realization of the component swarm as a hierarchical swarm
      • Efficient reconfiguration by means of "automation of automation", e.g. autonomous logistics and measuring / testing technology

      © Fraunhofer IML

      Fields of application

      • Companies with products in a high number of variants
      • Automotive industry