Segmented Body Assembly System for the SMART Car Body Shop

Increased international competition of automotive companies have lead to new approaches and concepts for the manufacturing processes, especially for body-in-white (BIW) manufacturing systems. The main issues are competitive cost advantages, shorter launch periods and quality of produced vehicles. The supplier acting as general contractor and the customer have applied a new approach for operating and engineering as well as installing a segmented BIW-system. This paper will present the conceptional approach based on an advanced operating concept to engineer and realize a competitive BIW-system.