Development And Application Of Rfid-enable Real-time Painted Body Storage Monitoring System

As takt time becomes shorter with the growth of automotive production and product configurations become more diverse with the increasing of customizing requirements, Painted body storage (referred to as PBS) ,which controlled and managed by the manual operation, is increasingly becoming bottleneck to improving production efficiency and fast response capacity. In the mixed-model assembly production, buffer is an important component part of manufacturing system. It is not only used to store the work-in-process (referred to as WIP) to reduce the impact of uncertainty in manufacturing system, but also used to reschedule the WIP to ensure a balanced production or high production efficiency requirements of follow-up process. In this paper, the author thoroughly studies real-time monitoring of PBS which located between paint shop and trim shop based on the automotive industry, aimed at solving problems caused by manual monitoring and controlling of PBS, and then establishing an effective system solution for real-time monitoring of buffer.According to characteristics of PBS, this paper analyzes the demand of real-time PBS monitoring system and summarizes it in four core functions: equipment status monitoring, PBS management, PBS operation and carbody management of about–to–trimmed. Based on the demand analysis of real-time PBS monitoring system and hardware facilities of PBS, this paper discusses design and implementation process of the RFID-enabled real-time PBS monitoring system (referred to as RRMS) in detail. RRMS achieves status visualization and real-time WIP monitoring of PBS, and makes PBS into a transparent, open and controllable system. RRMS is successfully applied to PBS of JAC MPV assembly plants and achieves good economic benefit. Integrated with manufacturing execution system (referred to as MES), RRMS greatly enhance the efficiency of PBS system. And, because MES can real-time get the carbody sequences of about–to–trimmed from RRMS, it doubles the lead time of material delivery and effectively reduces production down-time times due to lack of material.