The competitive situation in automotive industry and increasing market demands necessarily lead to higher complexity in product development, production planning and production ramp-up processes. One key challenge for mobilising important time and cost resources in production engineering projects is a virtual validation of the ramp-up. Especially in cross-functional cases where many planning dep...

The task of balancing of assembly lines is well-known in mass production system but this problem is NP-hard even for the simple straight line. Therefore, utilizing heuristic methods for these problems is totally unquestionable. Furthermore, in line with balancing problems, heuristic methods are the foundation of the metaheuristic methods, thus it seems to be necessary to use more efficient heur...

The rapid automation of automotive body assembly operations has resulted in a proliferation of the process steps to be monitored and displayed, thereby making the task of the worker more complex. The progression of assembly and associated machine cycling is controlled by programmable logic controllers whose states are displayed on control panels. The significance of the interface between a work...

Manufacturing companies continuously evaluate their achieved performance based on different Key Performance Indicators (KPI). This article gives an overview about the OEE values. The study aims to provide practical data of semi-automatic assembly lines used in automotive industry. Its novelty is revealed relationship between seat and subassembly lines. Firstly, a literature review shows scienti...

The Virtual Commissioning VC technology is the latest trend in automotive assembly which, among other benefits, promises a more efficient handling of the complexity in assembly systems, a great reduction in the system’s ramp-up time, and a resulting shortening of the product’s time to market. This paper presents the application of VC techniques to the case of an industrial robotic cell, involvi...

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) are costly and common problem in automotive manufacturing. The research goal was to quantify MSD exposure as a function of vehicle rotation angle and region during assembly tasks. The study was conducted at the Center for Occupational Health in Automotive Manufacturing (COHAM) Laboratory. Twelve subjects participated in the study. The vehicle was divided into sev...

In automatic voice response systems where a large number of words are inserted into fixed sentences, such as in voiceguided car navigation systems, one of the most important problems is the adjustment of the fundamental frequency (F0) contour of the inserted word to suit the F0 context of the fixed sentence. The effects of intonation and tone on the F0 contours of Chinese words can be described...