Automotive Wiring Harness development with the use of „Follow the Sun” – teams located in different time zones

Demands of automotive industry is especially focused on new solutions. Nowadays, these needs are stronger than have ever been. Manufacturers are constantly looking for new ways to release their products in the shortest possible time. The research described in the paper concerns work organization and project management in automotive industry. It is a part of PhD project, dedicated to the implementation of remote team collaboration, and is focused on wiring harness development. The first part of the paper is devoted to the review of different forms of work organization with special attention paid to Follow The Sun approach. In the second part of the paper, the characteristic of the wiring harness production was described. Especially, the methodology and design processes. The third part of the article presents a proposition of transforming the currently existing development process with the use of remote teamwork solutions. The article concludes with a description of the implementation of the test projects. Selected indicators were introduced to determine the profitability of this implementation.

8D Problem Solving Methodology: Continuous Improvement in Automation Organization

The Eight Disciplines (8D) is a problem-solving technique methodology to identify the root cause of a problem, devise a short-term fix and implement a long-term solution to prevent recurring problems. 8D is a remarkable first step to enhancing Quality and Reliability when the product is defective or not satisfying the customer. The study was conducted in a manufacturing company producing and assembly wire harness. The data was collected for a period of Three months from July 2020 to September 2020, to identify defective percentage of wire harness and they were found to be high at the average rate of 51.39%. In this work the objective was set to investigates quality issues and provides a solution to reduce the rejection of wiring harness mainly in crimping process. In order to achieve this, 8D problem solving technique was used to analyze and solve the problem. Then, Pareto analysis was done to identify vital causes contributing defectives. From the Pareto analysis, it was found that functioning contact crimp condition with percentage 66.67% is the major cause for rejection. Further brainstorming sessions was held to identify the root causes. After the brainstorming session, cause and effect diagram was constructed and it was found to be variation in the that the connector near cable chain is moving area. Thus, the wire assembly with too high radius may caused external force to the wires when machine running with speed and the end of wire may break off when the wire stretched. The suggestions to reduce the rejection percentage were to install mounting bracket prevent wires shaking when machine running and use proper crimp tools. After implementing the suggestion, the total rejection for wire harness particularly contact crimp condition was reduced to 0.93% in December 2020, from average rejection of 66.67%. (3 months data).

A New Product Development Model for SMEs: Introducing Agility to the Plan-Driven Concurrent Product Development Approach

In order to survive in today’s highly competitive global market, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have had to transition from sequential to concurrent product development, which significantly shortens development cycles, reduces costs, and ensures high product quality. Despite its many benefits, concurrent product development is still based on detailed upfront planning and cannot address the challenges related to today’s ever-growing uncertainty, constantly changing environment, and unstable requirements. A potential solution to this problem could be in more flexible and value-driven agile project management (APM) approaches, typical of software development. In this paper, we propose a new product development model specifically appropriate for SMEs that combines concurrent product development principles with APM elements. It is designed as a loop of five repetitive steps (macroplan, microplan, iteration activities, review, and retrospective) that are being executed within individual concurrent development loops. The application of the model is presented on a real case example of process development and small batch manufacture of a complex wiring harness. The study reveals many benefits of the proposed model, such as improved communication, faster detection of discrepancies, more effective problem solving, and greater flexibility. A positive impact on project success is also observed.

FUZZY FMEA APPLICATION TO IDENTIFICATION RISK IN-PROCESS PRODUCTION OF TOYOTA HI-ACE WIRING HARNESS PRODUCT

In product manufacture, the high failure rate problem of produce product is the number of product defects. Several types of defects have a high enough percentage. To solve this problem, we need to identify the failures and to get the assessment information of the three risk factors. Our research using the traditional FMEA method at the production of Wiring Harness products to shows the current condition of various modes of failure in those areas. This study focuses on implementing fuzzy FMEA to identify the potential risks that may occur along with the assembling of the Wiring Harness process. The fuzzy FMEA approach is preventing product and process problems before they occur, this paper is also expected to result in some mitigation effort that can be applied to improve the Wiring Harness production process. With the Fuzzy FMEA method, we have found the highest FRPN value that shows the highest defect such as damage insulation is 8.5, damage terminal is 8.5, and the damaged part is 8.5 and the highest RPN from the traditional FMEA is damage insulation (324). To solve this problem, we propose to use the fishbone diagram and give suggestions for improvements to the highest failure modes that are damaged insulation.

Mathematical model for the tensile strength of the crimping assembly of aviation wiring harness end

In this study, the relationship between the tensile strength and the indentation depth was studied by analysing the deformation mechanism of the crimping assembly of the aviation wiring harness end. Tensile strength tests were performed on samples of crimping assemblies with different indentation depths. The results showed that the experimental and theoretical values were in good agreement, verifying the validity of the established mathematical model for tensile strength. Based on this model, a reasonable design range for the indentation depth corresponding to the specific combination of contacts and strands was determined.

Online and Offline Diagnosis of Motor Power Cables Based on 1D CNN and Periodic Burst Signal Injection

We introduce a new approach for online and offline soft fault diagnosis in motor power cables, utilizing periodic burst injection and nonintrusive capacitive coupling. We focus on diagnosing soft faults because local cable modifications or soft faults that occur without any indication while the cable is still operational can eventually develop into hard faults; furthermore, advance diagnosis of soft faults is more beneficial than the later diagnosis of hard faults, with respect to preventing catastrophic production stoppages. Both online and offline diagnoses with on-site diagnostic ability are needed because the equipment in the automated lines operates for 24 h per day, except during scheduled maintenance. A 1D CNN model was utilized to learn high-level features. The advantages of the proposed method are that (1) it is suitable for wiring harness cables in automated factories, where the installed cables are extremely short; (2) it can be simply and identically applied for both online and offline diagnoses and to a variety of cable types; and (3) the diagnosis model can be directly established from the raw signal, without manual feature extraction and prior domain knowledge. Experiments conducted with various fault scenarios demonstrate that this method can be applied to practical cable faults.

Tell Me, What Do You See?—Interpretable Classification of Wiring Harness Branches with Deep Neural Networks

In the context of the robotisation of industrial operations related to manipulating deformable linear objects, there is a need for sophisticated machine vision systems, which could classify the wiring harness branches and provide information on where to put them in the assembly process. However, industrial applications require the interpretability of the machine learning system predictions, as the user wants to know the underlying reason for the decision made by the system. We propose several different neural network architectures that are tested on our novel dataset to address this issue. We conducted various experiments to assess the influence of modality, data fusion type, and the impact of data augmentation and pretraining. The outcome of the network is evaluated in terms of the performance and is also equipped with saliency maps, which allow the user to gain in-depth insight into the classifier’s operation, including a way of explaining the responses of the deep neural network and making system predictions interpretable by humans.

Multi-Stroke Lightning Interaction with Wiring Harness: Experimental Tests and Modelling

This paper presents the obtained results of experimental tests and modelling of lightning disturbances that were propagated in a model of aircraft cable bundle and caused by multiple lightning return-strokes interactions. The work is a continuation of previous research, which was concerned mainly with the interaction of lightning discharge with a single return-stroke. The section of the cable harness arranged above the metal plate was investigated. In one of its wires, a multiple-stroke current representing indirect lightning effects was injected from an impulse current generator dedicated to avionics immunity tests. Overvoltages induced at the ends of other wires surrounded by a braided shield, as well as the influence of line parameters and shield grounding condition on the shape and level of observed transients, were examined. The computer simulation results match the measurement data with satisfactory accuracy, and therefore, the presented model can be used to estimate indirect lightning effects in the wiring harness of avionics.