Abstract:

Manufacturing companies are continuously facing the challenge of operating their manufacturing processes and systems in order to deliver the required production rates of high quality products of increasing complexity, with limited use and waste of resources. This aspect is particularly critical in emerging sectors, such as the e-mobility industry, where state of the art quality and process control technologies show strong limitations. This paper proposes new solutions for implementing in-line product repair strategies in the production of electric drives for the automotive industry. Moreover, it develops an innovative quantitative tool to estimate the impact of the proposed strategies on the overall process-chain performance. The benefits of the approach are validated within a real industrial context.  The proposed approach in this paper is general and applicable to systems in several industries, thus paving the way to the implementation of the zero-defect manufacturing paradigm in industry.