Simulation of processing equipment and evaluation of simulation software

Sammanfattning: The cab assembly line in Oskarshamn is one of the world's most high tech production unit. With close to 300 robots the cab is assembled with merely programmed robots and no input from humans. Scania CV AB is a world leading manufacturer of trucks with high influence on the market globally. Even though robots do most of the work, there have been human brains behind the robot execution, and there is constant work ongoing to further increase efficiency and cycle times to meet the increasing global demand for logistics services. The robots are mainly programmed offline, using the ABB software Robotstudio, which basically creates a digital representation of the actual control system without interfering with the production. Testing upgraded programs as well as simulating them offline before implementation is an essential daily operation to make the production meet the demands. This thesis is divided into two objectives, one theoretical and one practical. The theoretical part focuses on the software, and consists of a critical analysis of a series of different software solutions for programming robots offline, as well as a look into how the offline programming processes work today in-house. The practical objective is to further improve the quality of the simulations conducted through creating tools to answer the calls from functional packages for the different processing equipment used on site. These functional packages lets you perform spot welding, gluing or gripping for instance, and as it is an outsourced service a lot of the coding is encrypted which prevents simulations being conducted with the pre-programmed routines, it makes the simulations crash. This report presents conclusions made regarding the use of offline programming equipment both in the regards of daily operations as well as long term strategies with digital twins and digitization. It also proves that the functional packages still can be simulated even though the code has been manipulated and encrypted at one point. It holds the complete ways of how to, from a 3D CAD model, create mechanisms, synchronize external axes, and creating smart components to answer digital inputs and presenting digital outputs to the system to have a fully functional simulation run.