Design, prototyping, validation and optimisation of Industry 4.0 assembly cell/production line concepts and architectures

Open architecture of multiple reconfigurable work cells for flexible assembly.

Problem

The Flemish manufacturing industry is increasingly confronted with markets demanding highly customised products that must be built to order and assembled quickly and reliably. Obviously, their production systems, which are currently organised to build larger batches of the same products, need a major rethinking and reworking.

Solution

Our infraflex environment consists of an open architecture of multiple reconfigurable work cells for various assembly tasks, end-effectors and quality controls, allowing to assemble and disassemble multiple customised products in a flexible and reliable way with short reconfiguration times and achieving an optimal single-piece flow. The infrastructure also includes extensive monitoring equipment, which allows to collect valuable production data and evaluate advanced data-driven and model-based assembly process optimisation techniques.

Customer value

Infraflex is an infrastructure that allows testing, validating and demonstrating new concepts aimed at enhancing the flexibility and robustness of the assembly process. The infrastructure is easy to reconfigure so that different configurations and architectures can be validated. The main advantage is that customer can make experimental setups and validate different assembly scenarios in a flexible way under industrial conditions while the whole process is continuously being monitored and optimised.