Japanese Plant Engineering Company Designs and Builds Automotive Facilities with CATIA and DELMIA

AES Co. Ltd Creates Production-Ready Facility 5 Times Faster.

YOKOHAMA, Japan - Dassault Systèmes has announced that AES Co. Ltd (Kanagawa, Japan), a global plant engineering company specializing in the creation of automotive production facilities, has significantly reduced the time it takes to design and build production facilities through implementation and integration of Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA virtual design and DELMIA digital manufacturing and production solutions. AES designs all its lines, fixtures, and tooling in CATIA, which are then simulated in DELMIA to identify errors and optimize the use of robots and other equipment.

“Over the past five years, we have been able to speed up the time it takes to complete facility engineering and design by at least a factor of five,” said Masahiko Nakazono, manager of AES Digital Engineering Office. “This is partly due to the improved skills of our engineers, but the efficiency and productivity gains that the CATIA and DELMIA solutions have given us are equally important.”

AES has been using CATIA and DELMIA extensively in its entire process flowfrom factory planning to production ramp-up. For stamping and body-in-white processes, AES has used DELMIA software, as well as for manufacturability and feasibility tests, simultaneous engineering, and basic and detailed design tasks including robot applicability simulations. In simulations designed to examine the applicability of robots to specific processes, AES directly imports 3D models created with CATIA into DELMIA Robotics and then evaluates possible spot welding sequences to help in the planning of the welding processes. When adapting an existing production line to new car models, these software tools are also employed to check whether the existing robots and welding guns are applicable to the new process.

To assure greater precision of the robots' movements, it is critical to understand exactly how the robots move, so the jig designs can be optimized. Conducting simulations with DELMIA while designing jigs with CATIA allows any errors to be identified and corrected at the same time. "That is the most significant advantage of using DELMIA and CATIA together, and no competing products can emulate them," says Masahiko Nakazono. Implementing a simultaneous engineering strategy for a recent Chinese auto manufacturer, AES’ conceptual designs were compared to the client’s 3D models, allowing 80 to 100 design flaws to be identified within two months. This allowed direct feedback to the designers who could make the corrections prior to prototype build.

AES also carries out offline programming of robot paths using personal computers. Critical in this process are the actual measurements of the shop floor, including the relative positions of equipment and the shapes and sizes of obstacles. For offline programming tasks, AES uses DELMIA Robotics and 3D laser scanning technology to create a digital model that is tightly correlated with the actual shop floor. When the process design is evaluated and optimized through these simulations, the results are converted into machine control programs and downloaded to each piece of equipment.

In addition to the time savings, the accuracy of the checks and evaluations performed during the early planning stage and after the completion of jig designs has improved significantly. “The intricate timing for lock-and-release among multiple robots is made clearly visible, and it takes only a short while to check and verify the timing even when a large number of robots are involved," Nakazono says.