Study And Application Of Data Collection Technology For Automotive Engine Assembly Workshop

The automotive industry has become a pillar industry of China’s national economy. And the rapid growth of demand for cars leads to the rapid development of the automotive engine industry. With the increasingly high demand of automation and informatization for automotive engine production, a variety of production management information systems have been applied. Among them, the MES develops rapidly, which plays a connecting role between business management and workshop control system. And in the MES system, workshop data collection is very important. Only if workshop production data is collected to database of MES system in real time, MES system can control effectively production plan, manufacturing equipment, production materials, production process, production quality, staff and so on.This paper analyzed the characteristic of automobile engine assembly workshop and production data, specified the functional demand of data collection system and proposed the solution of data collection system for automobile engine assembly workshop. Besides, it respectively described the application of RFID data collection technology and OPC XML data collection technology for automobile engine assembly workshop.For RFID technology, firstly, this paper proposed the o verall program of RFID-based WIP tracking for automobile engine and designed tracking process for each of important station in detail, by analyzing the assembly process of automobile engine. Secondly, a kind of RFID-based method of equipment maintenance data collection and recording was introduced. It is safer and can query and record quickly equipment maintenance data in the distance. What’s more, it can alarm when a machine don’t be maintained according to plan. At last, this paper designed and developed a RSSI-based RFID prototype system of location and tracking for vehicles in workshop, using trilateration and centroid. And the RFID location middleware was focused designed in detail, which has four functional modules. Besides, three functional interfaces were developed for systems application. Systems application can respectively realize the real-time location and tracking fo r different types of vehicles.For OPC XML technology, the OPC XML-based data collection program of equipment for automobile engine assembly workshop was proposed, whose hardware configuration and OPC data collection process were described. Besides, this paper designed OPC DA server、OPC XML server and client, and the OPC objects of OPC DA server were focused designed in detail.At last, data collection system for workshop, as a basic module of MES system, was implemented for an engine plant. And it respectively realized production order tracking、production schedule tracking for work order、collection and traceability for key parts、report display and graphical display of device status, as well as LED large screen monitoring for device status.