Success Story: How an algorithm revolutionizes the road test in Volkswagen’s production
In all car manufacturing plants, every produced vehicle passes different driving and testing stations before being delivered to its new owner. The production processes are becoming more and more reliable, stable and the success rate of quality checkpoints is increasing constantly. In other words, plants are spending more and more time on testing cars without failures. This potential was addressed at Volkswagen Autoeuropa in Palmela.
Road Test Predictor
The Road Test Predictor application is a tool for quality inspectors to help to decide which vehicles should be tested and which can bypass the road test inspection process on the assembly line. This can result in significant time and cost savings, as well as an increase in productivity and carbon neutrality as fewer vehicles go through the road test and emissions are avoided. The Road Test Predictor application analyzes production data across more than 10,000 attributes per car and is also highly scalable to other brands and plants in the automotive industry.
With the expertise of Amorph Systems and its integration platform SMARTUNIFIER, the production equipment of the plant is connected to the cloud to provide the high amount of production data in real-time to the Road Test Predictor application. The system of the Road Test Predictor application is based on a lean AWS architecture that enables the data flow of each vehicle from the shop floor to the prediction algorithm.
“The statistical analysis of data we perform with the Road Test Predictor application shows us what is negatively influencing the road test outcome. This is an example of how data helps us to better understand and optimize our processes”
Francisco Benavente, Project Leader Road Test Predictor at Volkswagen Autoeuropa in Palmela
Visualization and Benefits
In the future, the result will be visualized in a traffic light, which provides the quality experts in the assembly line with a precise indication of whether a vehicle should go through the road test or not. On this basis, the expert can then decide and, in many cases, skip the road test and seamlessly route the vehicle to the next station. This saves several minutes per vehicle in production. All in all, the Road Test Predictor is an application that is easy and intuitive to use and provides precise predictions about the vehicle in production.
The potential benefits are cost reduction and process optimization – much leaner processes are the first big steps in using big data for predictive analysis applied to car manufacturing processes.
Read the full success story about how the Palmela plant of Volkswagen Autoeuropa makes use of big data to predict production processes – a first insight into the future of manufacturing:
https://www.industrialcloudhub.com/en/Community/RTP.html
About Amorph Systems
Amorph Systems is a leading developer of software technologies and products in the field of industrial connectivity. For industrial IT applications, Amorph Systems provides its powerful and easy-to-use SMARTUNIFIER Integration Platform. With SMARTUNIFIER, customers are able to acquire any kind of production data from a large assortment of shopfloor equipment devices and IT-Systems and make them usable in a variety of ways. SMARTUNIFIER collects the raw data locally at the Edge, enriches it with full semantics, transforms it as required, and pushes it instantly and securely into the Cloud. Capable of combining an extensive variety of communication protocols, SMARTUNIFIER builds the bridge between local shopfloor IT environments and the Cloud.
More about the Industrial Cloud:
