• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.118-126
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• 2003

Digital Manufacturing is a technology facilitating effective developments and agile productions of the product via digital computer models representing physical and logical schema and the behavior of the real manufacturing systems including manufacturing resources, environments and products. For the successful application of this technology, a digital factory as a well-designed and an integrated environment is essential. In this paper, we constructed the sophisticated digital factory of a Korean automotive company's body shop, and conducted precise simulations of unit cell, lines and the whole factory for the collision check, the production flow analysis and the off-line programming. We expect that this digital factory of the body shop helps us achieve great savings in time and cost for many manufacturing preparation activities of the new car development.

• IE interfaces
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.352-361
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• 2003

Vehicle manufacturing plant is a typical mixed-model production system. Generally it consists of three main shops including body shop, painting shop and assembly shop in addition to engine shop. Each shop contains diverse manufacturing processes, all of which are integrated in a form of flow line. Due to the high pressure from the market requesting small-volume large variety production, production planning becomes very critical for the competitiveness of automotive industry. In order to save costs and production time, production planning system is requested to meet some designated requirements for each shop: to balance the work load in body and assembly shops, and to minimize the number of color changes in painting shop. In this context, we developed a sequencing module for a vehicle production planning system using the ILOG Solver Library. It is designed to take into account all the manufacturing constraints at a time with meeting hard constraints in body shop, minimizing the number of soft constraints violated in assembly shop, and minimizing the number of color changes in painting shop.

• IE interfaces
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.136-147
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• 2005

This paper introduces a simulation study regarding the operation of the Painted Body Storage (PBS) in an automobile factory. In the paint shop of the factory, same colored bodies are grouped together in order to increase the effectiveness of process, for example decrease the loss of cleaning the painting-gun when the color of body changes from one to another. However the production of automobiles in the assembly shop is a typical example of the mixed model assembly production. Therefore PBS locates between the paint shop and the assembly shop for control the input sequence of bodies to the assembly shop, and it enables to meet the smoothing requirement of assembly sequence. There are highly restricted constraints on the assembly sequence in a assembly shop. Those are spacing restriction and smoothing restriction. If such restrictions are violated, conveyor-stop or utility work will be necessary. Thus the major objective of PBS is to control the assembly sequence in a way to meet the two restrictions. In this paper a case study of PBS in an automotive factory is introduced. The storage/retrieval algorithms are suggested and the proposed system is verified using simulation models. Sensitivity analysis for operating factors is also conducted.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.470-480
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• 2015

There are many challenges in manufacturing system for new factory construction. Although factories produce same product, the layout of each factory may be different. The body shop in an automotive factory is a typical flow line with assembly, but the layout concept of the line varies among factories. In this paper, two types of layouts in the body shops of automotive factories, one for layered build and the other for modular build, are compared using simulation study. The simulation experiments indicate that the modular build layout is better than the layered build layout with respect to production rate. The effects of various failure distributions on the throughputs are also investigated, and some insights are suggested regarding the layout concept.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.1166-1172
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• 2003

The extremely strong competition among the world automobile industries has introduced the concept of PLM in the total production activities, one of whose major components is VM(Virtual Manufacturing). If the production lines are equipped with robots, the application of OLP in the virtual space is fully mature. However, in the point of the investment's and the maintenance's view, there are always some activities, which can not be automated: for example, typically the manual welding for prefixing in the automobile body shop and the material loading. Process planning for these activities, therefore, are decided mainly by experiences, which caused many repeated rework of the processes and the inconvenience of the workers, and resulted consequently in the reduction of the productivity and the safety of the workers. In this paper, the optimal dimension of the welding gun and its handle position and the optimal working path is simulated and decided by use of DELIMN/IGRIP and DELMIA/Ergo and the working area modelized in the virtual workcell of DELMIA.

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.21-25
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• 2016

The automotive vehicle is made through the following processes such as press shop, welding shop, paint shop, and general assembly. Among them, the most important process to determine the quality of the car body is the welding process. Generally, more than 400 pressed panels are welded to make BIW (Body In White) by using the RSW (Resistance Spot Welding) and GMAW (Gas Metal Arc Welding). Recently, as the needs of light-weight material due to the $CO_2$ emission issue and fuel efficiency, new joining technologies for aluminum, CFRP (Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic) and etc. are needed. Aluminum parts are assembled by the spot welding, clinching, and SPR (Self Piercing Rivet) and friction stir welding process. Structural adhesive boning is another main joining method for light-weight materials. For example, one piece aluminum shock absorber housing part is made by die casting process and is assembled with conventional steel part by SPR and adhesive bond. Another way to reduce the amount of the car body weight is to use AHSS (Advanced High Strength Steel) panel including hot stamping boron alloyed steel. As the new materials are introduced to car body joining, productivity and quality have become more critical. Productivity improvement technology and adaptive welding control are essential technology for the future manufacturing environment.

• IE interfaces
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.127-133
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• 2001

Virtual Manufacturing is a technology facilitating effective development and agile production of products via computer models representing physical and logical schema and the behavior of the real manufacturing systems. For the successful application of this technology, a virtual plant as a well-designed and integrated environment is essential. We propose a series of systematic approaches and effective methods for construction and operation of a virtual plant in this paper, such as a 3-D CAD modeling, cell and line simulations and databases. We developed key technologies for measuring and 3-D CAD modeling of many equipments, facilities and structures of the buildings. In order to study the benefit of virtual manufacturing, we constructed a sophisticated virtual plant model of a Korean automotive company's body shop, and conducted precise simulations of unit cell, lines and the whole plant. We could obtain the benefit of savings in time and cost in many manufacturing preparation activities in the new car development processes.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.1424-1428
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• 2005

This paper describes a dedicated three-dimensional CAD system for design of drawing dies for automotive body panels. Since solid die models are useful not only for simulations for design verification, but also for NC tool path generation to machine dies and their Styrofoam patterns, 3-D CAD systems have been introduced in the tooling shop of automotive manufacturers. However, the work to build solid models requires a lot of time and effort if the designer uses only the general modeling capabilities of commercial 3-D CAD systems. To solve this problem, we customized a 3-D CAD system for the drawing die design. The system provides not only 3-D design capabilities, but also standard part libraries to enhance design productivity. By introducing this system, the drawing dies can be designed more rapidly in the 3-D space, and their solid data can be directly transferred to CAM tools for NC tool path generation and simulation tools for virtual manufacturing

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.73.2-73
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• 2001

Nowadays, one of the major technical issues in manufacturing is how to implement an virtual plant as an well-designed, integrated environment for sharing information and engineering collaboration among diverse engineering activities. The systematic approaches to make a virtual plant based on a 3-dimensional CAD, cell and line simulation, database and internet technologies are proposed in this paper. To do that, measuring and 3D CAD modeling technologies of many equipments, facilities and structures of the building are developed, effective management of information including models and related files in WWW environment is implemented, and precise simulations of unit cell and whole structured plant are performed. For the beginning of implementing a Virtual Automotive Plant, the Virtual Plant for the Body Shop of a Korean automotive company is constructed and implemented, Using this Virtual Plant ...

• Journal of Welding and Joining
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.17-22
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• 2013

The excellent beam quality of high power fiber lasers are commonly used for remote welding applications in body job applications. The Welding speed and productivity is unmatched with any other welding technology including resistance spot welding or traditional laser welding. High tooling cost for clamping and bulky safety enclosures are obstacles which are limiting the use. With the newly developed Laser stitch welding gun we have an integrated clamping in the process tool and the laser welding is shielded in a way that no external enclosure is needed. Operation of this laser welding gun is comparable with resistance spot welding but 2-times faster. Laser stitch welding is faster than spot welding and slower than remote welding. It is a laser welding tool with all the laser benefits like welding of short flanges, weld ability of Ultra High Strength steel, 3 layers welding and Aluminium welding. Together with low energy consumption and minimum operation cost of IPG fiber laser it is a new and sharp tool for economic car body assembly.