Ontology-Based Analysis of Manufacturing Processes: Lessons Learned from the Case Study of Wire Harness Production

Effective information management is critical for the development of manufacturing processes. This paper aims to provide an overview of ontologies that can be utilized in building Industry 4.0 applications. The main contributions of the work are that it highlights ontologies that are suitable for manufacturing management and recommends the multilayer-network-based interpretation and analysis of ontology-based databases. This article not only serves as a reference for engineers and researchers on ontologies but also presents a reproducible industrial case study that describes the ontology-based model of a wire harness assembly manufacturing process.

Mechatronic Re-Design of a Manual Assembly Workstation into a Collaborative One for Wire Harness Assemblies

Nowadays, the wire harness assembly process is still manually performed due to the process complexity and product variability (e.g., wires of different kind, size and length). The Wire cobots project, in which this work was conceived, aims at improving the current state-of-art assembly process by introducing in it collaborative robotics. A shared workstation exploiting human abilities and machine strengths was developed to assembly automotive wire harness by means of insulated tape for a real industrial case. In the new workstation, the human deals with the complex task of wire handling, while the robot performs the repetitive and strenuous taping operations. Such a task allocation together with the workstation redesign allow for an improvement of the operator’s well-being in terms of postural conditions and for an increase of the production efficiency. In this paper, the mechanical and mechatronic design, as well as the realization and validation of this new collaborative workstation are presented and discussed.

Increasing the Automation Degree in Wiring Harness Assembly by Extending the Standard Crimping Machines by Developed Assembly Concept

In the automotive industry, the assembly of wiring harnesses is done mostly manually. This leads to high labour costs as well as a high number of defects. In order to minimize these disadvantages, both industry and research made huge efforts in recent decades to increase the level of automation in the assembly of wiring harness modules. The fully automated crimping and blockloading machine e.g. Komax Zeta 656, is already successfully used in the industry as a machine for the automated assembly of small wiring harnesses. But still, there is a great potential to increase efficiency and quality in the assembly of wiring harnesses. This paper presents a newly developed machine concept for the fully automated assembly of wiring harnesses. It is shown that the new system can provide higher production efficiency compared to both the competitive systems and manual assembly. The presented concept also helps saving resources as it uses the standard crimping machine as e.g. Komax Alpha 355 as a basis which is already present in many wiring harness factories. To set up the presented mounting machine the Komax Alpha has not to be fully replaced, but only to be extended by a few components.