These are examples of research impact during the VINN Excellence Research Program 2007-2017.
Implementation cases
1. GKN Aerospace Engine Systems: Functional Architecture Evaluation
Research theme: Platform-based Development
Industrial need
GKN Aerospace and Chalmers are two of some 35 partners within the European aerospace and PLM SW industries engaged in the EU project TOICA. The TOICA consortium needs new methods and IT tools to conduct collaborative novel aircraft architecture design.
2. Volvo Group Trucks Technology: PDM Configurator
Research theme: Platform-based Development
Industrial need
Product variants are described with configuration rules stored in in-house developed Product Data Management (PDM) systems. The development process for configuration rules has been time-consuming and error-prone, as the configuration rules previously have required complicated manual computations. Volvo GTT and others have expressed a need to find automated alternatives.
3. Atlas Copco: Geometry Assurance Process
Research theme: Smart Assembly
Industrial need
For the business area Atlas Copco Rock Drills, a major problem has been to secure the geometrical quality and assemblability. The production is characterized by fairly low volumes and a large number of unique variants. When the project started, no general, documented working procedure for geometry assurance existed. However, some basic design and assembly concepts were used/reused in many product variants. For Atlas Copco, the purpose of the project was to understand the individual steps in their own product realization process, identify the critical tasks and define a general process for geometry assurance that could be adapted to a wide range of products.
4. Volvo Car Group: Line Balancing and Path Planning
Research theme: Smart Assembly
Industrial need
Complex assembled products such as an automotive car body consists of about 300 sheet metal parts joined by up to 4000 spot welds. Sheet metal assembly is indeed investment intense and in the body factory, there are welding lines with several hundreds of robots. The balancing of welds has a significant influence on achievable production rate and equipment utilization. Robot line balancing is a complex problem, where each weld is to be assigned to a specific station and robot, such that line cycle time is minimized. Industrial robot line balancing has been manually conducted in computer aided engineering (CAE)-tools based on experience and trial and error rather than mathematical methods.
5. Volvo Car Group: Inspection Preparation & OLP for Scanning
Research theme: Smart Assembly
Industrial need
Fast and efficient inspection is important both for securing geometrical quality and cutting lead time in the plant. Within Wingquist Laboratory one research group is focusing on geometry assurance and one group is focusing on geometry and motion planning. During Stage 2, these two research groups collaborated to develop methods and algorithms for inspection planning for efficient geometry inspection and offline programing (OLP). The solution resulted in approximately 25% faster programs for coordinate measure machines (CMMs) and up to 90% shortened offline programming time for creating the programs. The result was implemented at Volvo Cars based on the software packages RD&T and IPS.
6. Volvo Car Group: Virtual Commissioning Including PLC
Research Theme: Smart Assembly
Industrial need
Volvo Car Group has together with Wingquist Laboratory identified the need of a completely integrated work chain from virtual preparation, including automatically generated PLC code, to virtual and physical commissioning. Having such an integrated work chain, involving software tools for optimization and verification, achieves sustainable production facilities which are adaptable to future requirements on flexibility, availability, product variety, and human safety.