Large-scale automated assembly systems are widely used in automotive, aerospace and consumer electronics industries to obtain high quality products in less time. However, one disadvantage of these automated systems is that they are composed of too many working parameters. Since it is not possible to monitor all these parameters during the assembly process, an undetected error may propagate and result in a more critical detected error. In this paper, a unique way of detecting and diagnosing these types of failures by using Virtual Factories is discussed. A Virtual Factory was developed by building and linking several software modules to predict and diagnose propagated errors. A multi-station assembly system was modeled and a previously discussed “off-line prediction and recovery” method was applied. The obtained results showed that this method is capable of predicting propagated errors, which are too complex to solve for a human expert.

Issue Section:
Application Briefs
Keywords:
robots, assembling, large-scale systems, automation, manufacturing industries, errors, Virtual Factories, Error Propagation, Error Diagnosis
Topics:
Errors, Failure, Manufacturing
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