Technical and economic analysis of the use of computer vision systems in manufacturing systems
The current research aims to report a study on the impacts of the usage of a vision system, integrated into a die casting equipment of metal alloy material, for early detection of defective products generated during the manufacturing process and, after performing the analysis of the current process, estimate the impacts of including this control to a process that already uses SPC - Statistical Process Control. SPC is widely used however, due to its nature of sampling control, there may be a risk of sending products with problems to the next operation, or even to the final customer, and in certain sectors of the industry, such as automotive, fault tolerance levels are in a constantly decreasing due to the potential damage that a bad product can cause to the company. The methodology used was designed by observing the current process and extracting the following information: 1) definitions about the product and vision system that would serve as the study targets; the use of the FMEA tool;2)the survey of the operations currently used in the production process of the analyzed product; the estimation of the costs necessary to manufacture the product;3) the analysis of the process flow and the definition of a representative critical quota of the product which would be used to carry out the tests of the proof of technical feasibility. Finally, a solution was proposed about the necessary requirements for the implementation of the system, what would be the benefits arising from the implementation and what would be the estimated values and reliability levels involved in this project.