European Assembly:

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European Assembly Opportunities or
Threats? Mauro ONORI Luis Camarinha-MATOS Jose
BARATA ISATP 2003 Besançon, France, July 11th,
2003
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Assembly Net is a Thematic Network which aims to
broker knowledge, solutions, and requirements to
and from its members. Its focus is on mini
micro-assembly, although the transitions between
macro-micro, and its ensuing problems, are also
covered. www.assembly-net.org
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In order to tackle the challenges being posed by
the current trends and future prospects, the
Assembly Net consortium has created its own RD
roadmap for the next decade. Some results
conclusions from this endeavour will hereby be
detailed.
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Background facts
Is there anything to worry about? 20 of
manual assembly has left Europe since 2000.
Production Engineering schools are losing
students. The birth rate in Europe has been
negative. In the meanwhile. Samsung has a
private university with 30,000 students.
China produces 4,000,000 engineers/year...
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Perspective
Products usually consist of macro, mini, and
micro parts, but what are the general
subdivisions?
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Knowledge Status
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Knowledge Status
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Knowledge Status
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The Objectives

• The Roadmap was drawn out in order to
• Give an idea to our members as to what the
• future (required) RD areas will be.
• Confirm, and pinpoint, that there are gaps in
  the
• current European RD portfolio and industrial
• approaches.
• Analyse whether certain trends pose serious
• threats or may offer opportunities.
• Offer a Vision and details for attaining the
  needs.

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Trend 1
Lack/Loss of Process Knowledge
Assembly, as a process, is not structured, not
classified, and encompasses a huge range of
sub-processes that have not been categorised.
This affects standardisation, modelling, and
modularisation efforts, and supportive measures
such as ontologies cannot be verified. Since
academic research is becoming less involved in
application-oriented projects, and manual
workers are being laid off in industry, this
lack of process knowledge is being deteriorated
(further loss).
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Trend 1
In order to standardise equipment, one needs
to formalise the process it is designed
for. Formalising a process requires in-depth
knowledge of it, and all its sub-processes. Ther
efore, it is fairly safe to state that no truly
modular or standardised assembly equipment can
yet be achieved. Note that assembly
encompasses anything from spot-welding to micro
laser joining techniques, often including
testing, packaging and marking.
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Trend 2
Outsourcing-Insourcing
Outsourcing, a strategy used to curb costs and
focus on what companies call core competencies
The average wage of a south-east Asian worker
is of 100-150 / month. We simply cannot develop
a hardware solution that can compete with these
figures. In the meantime, there is great
confusion within companies as to what IS their
core competence
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Trend 2
In a questionnaire sent out by the Assembly-Net,
most Members replied that assembly WAS a core
competence
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Trend 2
they also stated that assembly, including some
final assembly, was being outsourced!
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Trend 2
The leading Contract Manufacturers are not
European, which entails an export of process
product knowledge.
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Trend 3
Weak link between Product-Production System Design
DFA, DFA2, DFMA, and other tools have not had the
intended depth of impact. Products are still, in
general, not being designed with particular
production system requirements in mind, or
vice-versa. Customer requirements are fed back
too late, production system requirements are not
well understood, etc. For products with parts
and proceses which defy the human eye, and open
new engineering domains, this will be critical.
There is no DFµA
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Trend 3
In fact, product design is starting to be
absorbed by the Contract Manufacturers as well.
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Trend 4
Very Low Equipment Re-Usability
Unfortunately, the existing paradigm of highly
flexible assembly systems still prevails and
results in expensive, highly technological
solutions, even when tagged with the feature
modular. Resulting fairly adequate to many
different product types, they fail to be very
performant in any domain. What is really needed
are systems that may evolve with the product,
market, and technological changes that a company
goes through
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Trend 4
Cost was given as one of the main reasons for
competitivity
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Trend 4
Re-configurable systems are a popular issue
today. Modular, Plug Produce systems can be
achieved, but what are also required are new
investment approaches, cost models, methodologies,
and supportive services. Once again, modular
systems can only be achieved on the basis of the
processes they serve. Without sound process
knowledge only mechanical modularity may be
achieved.
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Trend 4
Modular cell components must be linked to the
assembly processes that need to be carried
out. Standards need to be developed. Ontologies
need to be drawn out.
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Trend 5
Maintenance equation
Maintenance issues have not been regarded as
important by the RD community. This is serious
since operational information is of capital
importance and should absolutely be fed back
into the other product lifecycle phases. At
present, the main knowledge in maintenance is
held by shop-floor operators and foremen, people
that have been losing their jobs at an alarming
rate. Note that product and assembly system
re-engineering and re-configurability require
serious maintenance data support.
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Trend 5
The advent of micro and nano-factories will
obviously worsen this situation, mainly due to
their extremely small size human intervention in
case of production failures will be impossible.
The risk that entire microfactories will be
simply disposed of in case of fatal production
failures is large. This, in time, will become an
eco-sustainability issue. This will be a
multi-disciplinary problem
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Trend 6
Product Lifecycle uncertainties
The symptoms manifest themselves in very low
assembly system adaptability to product and
production variations, the inability to forecast
product changes in time, etc. The somewhat
hidden problem, however, is that the major part
of producing companies have to deal with planned
products and existing production facilities.
Ideally, they would like to fit any new
product, or product variant, into an existing
assembly system with as low costs as possible.
This entails that any new assembly system
solution has to fit into an existing facility,
even though this facility may denote performance
limitations. The same applies for new product
designs.
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Trend 6
Another major problem is that current
control/supervision architectures are not
efficient any change or addition made at
shop-floor level requires programming
modifications (production downtime). This
implies that qualified programmers must be called
in since this competence is seldom found within
producing companies, let alone SMEs. To worsen
the situation, such program modifications (even
small changes) might affect the global system
architecture, therefore causing an increased
programming effort and the potential for unwanted
side-effects. In order to reverse these
negative trends,a new methodology which
encompasses all phases in a product lifecycle is
required. This goes beyond linking product design
and system design.
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Trend 7
Virtual Enterprising / Collaborative Networks

• Multi-agent technologies and architectures are
  becoming
• a pre-requisite for enterprise agility.
• These solutions may be adapted to assist the
  development
• of re-engineering architectures, shop-floor
  control systems,
• and other aspects.
• However, this is being blocked by
• The lack of assembly process knowledge (cannot
  be modelled).
• Difficulty in integrating different enterprise
  cultures.
• Difficulty in bridging over to the Production
  Engineering
• community.

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Trend 8
Social Educational Issues
Demographically speaking, Europe will face a very
serious decline. There will be less workers and
less students, all the while other world areas
are increasing in these sectors. Mini and micro
assembly also requires a re-thinking
of traditional Production Engineering practices,
in which Computer science, Human factors,
Economics, and Natural Sciences will have to be
absorbed.
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Trend 8 survey
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Trend 8 survey
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Trend 8 survey
Preliminary Conclusions (survey to be finalised
September 2003) The USA is conducting RD work
in areas which are more appropriate for the
enhancement of micro assembly than
Europe Positioning, handling, microfactory, etc.
1-2 large scale efforts. Europe is still very
diversified and too focussed on particular
problems, thus missing the overall picture. No
large-scale efforts. No RD work seems to be
active within the services aspects and process
structuring aspects (vital for re-configurable
assembly). Europe does not embedd IT and other
disciplines well enough into its Production
Engineering courses. No work being done on
ontologies for micro assembly.
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Other underlying threats

• Outsourcing ltgt enterprise networks.
• Outsourcing Problem shifting.
• Micro nano unstable processes.
• Micro nanolow visibility.
• No process structures no standards.
• Poor knowledge management.
• Demography.
• Miniaturisationltgtoutsourcing.
• Eco-sustainability.
• New materialsdisassembly?

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GAP 1
There is no concerted RD effort to
structure, stabilise, formalise and categorise
assembly processes. This is vital for the
standardisation work, applications requiring
process models, and Modularisation.
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GAP 2
Maintenance and product design require new,
dedicated tools for the micro-assembly
domain. Micro processes are inherently
invisible and unstable, which means that Gap 1
must be covered before, or simultaneously, with
Gap2.
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GAP 3
The trends detailed, as well as Gaps 12 clearly
point out that there must be an effort to
develop an integrative methodology. This
requires the development of ontologies and
system control architectures.
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GAP 4
The academic infrastructure for Production
Engineering in Europe must stop adapting
traditional approaches to the micro
domain. New, far more multi-disciplinary courses
and RD efforts must be established. e.g-
µcontrol issues require IT, economics, contract
law, and social behavioural models
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The Vision
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The Vision
The Evolvable Ultra Precision Assembly Systems
vision is based on a methodology that enables
the continuous evolution of an existing assembly
system. It may evolve from manual to automatic
or vice-versa, depending on the needs. It will
assist product designers and system designers. It
will exploit operational data and after
sales information.
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The Vision
The basis for exploitation of this
methodology resides within virtual engineering
architectures. The formation of adequate
knowledge management foundations will rely on the
creation of virtual RD centres that could link
tools and information (resource providers), to
the users (producing companies) through
coordinated sets of decision-making mechanisms
and data validation tools (contracts). Such an
architecture can then be applied to the
re-engineering problem a shop-floor controller
for agile re-configurability.
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New Paradigm
This represents a shift in thinking since it
implies that theoretically very flexible,
multi-purpose cells will be replaced by a highly
flexible concept consisting of several
well-targeted but not, in themselves, highly
flexible components.
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New Investment Approach
Customised Precision Assembly Operations
Technology Providers
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Opportunity
This approach is being materialised within the
EUPASS (Evolvable Ultra Precision Assembly)
Integrated Project within the ECs 6th
Framework. Other initiatives are also taking
form, from national projects to larger
consortia.
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Conclusions
In view of the rate at which assembly is
disappearing to low-wage nations, students desert
Production Engineering disciplines, and the lack
of assembly process structuring, EUPASS
represents a vital yet small European
initiative. European academia should focus to a
far greater extent to the coming technological
requirements, and adapt its intellectual
infrastructures to meet these demands.