Intralogistic Value Creation – Potential of Mobile Assembly Processes
摘要
Current challenges in the industry, like the demand for sustainable production and the shortage of adequately skilled labor, necessitate more resource-conserving and therefore more efficient and sustainable processes and innovations. One promising approach to enhance production efficiency is intralogistic value creation, which involves parallelizing traditionally stationary value-creating production processes and currently non-value-creating intralogistic transport activities. By leveraging mobile robotic systems, such as mobile robot manipulators, it becomes possible to combine transport tasks with value-creating production operations. However, implementing such processes introduces technical challenges, including oscillation behavior, constrained workspaces, limited payload capacities, and compatibility with applicable joining processes. For this reason, this paper presents an approach for evaluating the potential of assembly processes for mobile applications with mobile robots to implement intralogistic value creation. This potential analysis uses a multi-stage evaluation based on a standardized process description of the applications under the assessment, considering technological and economic aspects. This approach aims to establish a standardized evaluation method that enables a quantifiable and, thus, objectively comparable assessment. This allows only processes with high success potential to be considered for more detailed and resource-intensive feasibility studies, whether in simulations or practical experiments.