UNIFICATION – Virtual Commissioning of Vehicle Maintenance Operations

The Swedish automotive industry needs to adapt to changes in product ranges and volumes, not to mention rising customer demands, in order to remain internationally competitive.

This creates a complicated situation with regard to production and aftermarket, which need to be able to handle the growing complexity that variability and configurability bring. This is further accentuated by the increasing degree of automation in both assembly and maintenance, aimed at achieving more sustainable and cost-effective production and aftermarket processes. UNIFICATION aims to create a general, sustainable and efficient solution for the automation of assembly and maintenance, where a market launch can be rolled out in stages, based on the company’s automation level.

The solution is based on collaborative robots that can work with human operators, plus smart tools that can be used by humans and robots alike. This scenario requires intimate collaboration with product design, so that the products are consciously designed for automated assembly and maintenance. The project brings together industry (AB Volvo, SETEK, ARHO), a university (Chalmers) and a research institute (FCC), with physical demonstrators located in existing plants to showcase the project’s goals, results and potential. The project will also be joining forces with existing national and international projects, so that equipment, virtual preparation and operation and software solutions for handling variability and configurability can be UNIFIED.

Project Participants
Chalmers
AB Volvo
Fraunhofer Chalmers
SETEK
ARHO

Project leader
Petter Falkman
Chalmers University of Technology
[email protected]