New era of automation in Scania’s manufacturing systems

Abstract: Today's car and truck industries are perceived as having complex production systems and relatively high manufacturing expenses, such as labour cost, which is usually combined with complex and unergonomic assembling tasks. A shift towards automation is one solution to eliminate such tasks while increasing productivity and lowering labour costs. Many products and assembly operations are designed to be performed manually, which creates additional challenges to re-shape these operations so that machines can carry them. The future is here, and what used to be manual, repetitive, and inefficient can now be automated. This master’s thesis suggests a potential solution of a fully automated assembly line of a steering wheel and front wheel on a pedal car; developed, tested, evaluated, and finally implemented in Scania's Smart Factory Lab. The study can be seen as a potential base and a physical demonstrator for implementing such a system in an actual assembly line. It has proven that even manually designed assembly tasks can be automated without a need for redesigning the process or the components involved. The study suggests a method to transform manual assembly operations into automated ones, the method is flexible and can be modified and applied for other types of manual assembly processes. Thereafter, the developing, testing, and implementation of some of the main automation system components, including the physical resources within the production line for the pedal car. Finally, the experienced challenges regarding the automation system components are summarised.