Simple Santa Manufacturing Shop (Part 2 — Assembly Planning)

Elements of the digital twin in manufacturing by example — planning the assembly process

Products need to be picked in the supermarket or get assembled in the assembly area.

In the first part we have seen that Santa has two base products in different variants, toy brick buildings and a cookie boxes. The brick buildings are assembled in the assembly area, the cookie boxes are put together in the supermarket area.

Given that he has to produce thousands of items in the same quality he has to tell his elves exactly what to do in which order when assembling them — he therefore defines an assembly process which is efficient and can be executed repeatedly by many elves in parallel in order to reach the desired output.

Since Santa keeps up with the times he additionally uses robots for fully automated assembly of his toy brick buildings.

manual and fully automatic assembly processes

The cookies for the different cookie box variants are picked and put into their boxes in the supermarket.

cookies get picked and put into boxes in the supermarket area

Cookie boxes — assembly process

The cookie boxes are put together by placing the different cookies in the boxes. Depending on the cookiebox variant an assembly step is omitted ( step 2 for “GingerRolls” or step 3 for “CinnamonStars” or performed a little differently (Step 2 +3 for “SantaMix”).

assembly steps for cookie box product variants

Toy Brick Buildings — manual assembly process

In the manual assembly process the elve uses a mounting frame to align the building elements when glueing them together using a glue gun.

assembly steps for different brick building variants

rule based operations with parts to be assembled

Toy brick buildings — automated process

The automated process is performed on a fixture by a robot arm equipped with a multi-gripper, glue is provided by a stationary glue station.

Digital Twin Elements

Products, Processes, Ressources

In order to fullfill our order list we use resources to create products by executing predefined processes.

Assembly Process Definition

rule based processes describe all operations to assemble any given base product variant for a certain production context

To efficiently describe assembly processes for a given base product we use rule based bills of operations which contain all operations needed to create any given product in any configuration.

There may be several assembly process descriptions for different resource characteristics

Brick Toy Buildings (Manual) — Operations

Brick Toy Buildings (Automated)

Automation specialist and fellow smart santafacturing enthusiast Jens Fetzer has covered this, see his article on linkedin :-)

So how will Santa distribute the workload on his different types of elves ?

… see Part 3 — Assembly Task Planning