ROBOT AND PLANT SIMULATION FOR AUTOMOTIVE PART PRODUCTION PROCESS DESIGN: A CASE STUDY.

Due to the higher competition in automobile industry, automotive part manufacturers who supply parts have also been challenged to improve the quality of their products to meet customers' requirements. Quality of parts or products could be controlled and improved since the stage of production process design. Efficient production process design could reduce work in process (WIP), wastes, reworks, errors, and failures, which could reduce system cost and increase quality of final products. However, production process design for the process which implements automatic systems is sophisticate due to the complication of the equipment itself and the synchronization requirement. This study presents the use of computer simulations to design an automotive part production process. Two objectives are proposed. The first one is to introduce three dimension robot (3D CAD) simulation for robotic work stations designed to meet the desired cycle time with minimum chance of robot collision and minimum number of robots in the system. The second one is to propose plant simulation for production planning design in order to produce product which could meet the desired capacity and customer needs with minimum number of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]