Automation feasibility assessment tool

Industrial automation has become an inseparable part of the current production plants. Since robotic systems are the game-changers of modern production plants, employing them efficiently helps the production owners to stay competitive in the growing market. Cognitively demanding processes such as meat processing steps have seen fewer advancements in automation and robotics. In addition, automation in this sector is usually considered for particular cases by experiments and without a systematic approach. In this Engineering Doctorate Thesis, a decision-making tool is designed to identify low-hanging fruit cases for automation and reflect on the automatability of the production processes at a meat production plant named Ekro. Despite a few efforts towards automation, most of the critical processes at Ekro are done manually. Due to the variety of processes, the automatability is assessed through the stages of the designed tool addressing multiple design challenges. The developed tool, "Automation Feasibility Assessment ” or “AFA”, includes analysis of different layers of production, from workstations to subtasks of a process. For this reason, a rough assessment called “scope determination” is initially done to prefilter processes before a detailed analysis. Then, the filtered processes are analyzed elaborately based on the process's goals and sub-goals. Detailed analysis of the processes called “Task Analysis” helps to determine the complexity of the manual operations. The output of the task analysis block is used to create the critical characteristics for automation. Capabilities and constraints of technologies directly affect the feasibility of automation. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the current technology's capabilities and constraints from different aspects. The main contribution of this EngD project is presented as the “Solution Space” which takes inputs from the task analysis, incorporates processes and tasks, and offers recommendations and insights based on existing technology and capabilities. This would mark out the low-hanging fruit cases of automation and demonstrate the complex tasks in a process from the automation perspective. Solution availability is the main criterion for introducing a task or process as a suitable candidate for automation. The output of this project offers insights into the automatability of processes at Ekro which is based on the different levels of detail. Additionally, it generates information regarding automation complexity, considering both the present process and potential future modifications. The validity of the designed decision-making tool is checked by holding trial runs and assessing the achieved insights. The practicality of this tool as well as its compatibility with the user’s knowledge is also a validation criterion.