Digital Integration for Automatic Programming of Welding Robots: Enabling End-to-End Digital Information Flows Through Product-Process-Resource Models

Small medium enterprises located in high-cost environments like Northern Europe, are increasing their reliance on digitalization and robotics to lower production costs and to keep the competitive edge over companies in low-cost environments. Using and developing technological methods shows that a high degree of flexibility is kept by digitally integrating manual labour and ensuring seamless end-to-end information flow across the internal and downstream supply chains. Thus, the concept of a product-model is proposed which congregates the design, engineering, and pre-production information about the product itself and the manufacturing system, in the context of steel welding industry. The necessary research and development are conducted through several design science cycles to ensure both the relevance of the proposed concept for the studied case company, and the rigor of the contribution to the knowledge base in the field. It is intended through the implementation of product-model based technologies to eliminate the need for manually conducted pre-production operations e.g., welding-robot programming, and radically reduce the time needed for pre-production operations.