SCHOOL OF MECHANCIACL ENGINEERING

Assignment – 1

Subject: Report on Automated System of an Automobile Sector Plant

Automobile plant: Honda manufacturing plant

Submitted by:
Aditya R Hegde (R16ME014)

School of Mechanical Engineering

REVA University Bangalore

Submitted To:
Dr. Pramod Kumar

Professor

School of Mechanical Engineering

REVA University Bangalore

HONDA MANUFACTURING PLANT AND ITS
AUTOMATION
INTRODUCTION
Honda is the world’s largest manufacturer of two wheelers,
Recognized over the world as the symbol of Honda Two
Wheelers, the ‘Wings’ arrived in India as Honda Motorcycle
and Scooter India Pvt. Ltd. (HMSI), a 100% subsidiary of
Honda Motor Company Ltd., Japan, in 1999. Since its
establishment in 1999 at Manesar, District Gurgaon, Haryana, Honda has lived up
to its reputation of offering the highest quality products at the most reasonable
price. Despite being one of the youngest players in the Indian two-wheelers
market, Honda has become the largest two wheeler manufacturer as well as the
second largest two-wheelers company in India.

Honda is also the fastest growing company in country today. With a host of
facilities under its wings, the first factory of HMSI is spread over 52 acres
including a covered area of about 100,000 sq. meters in Manesar, District Gurgaon,
Haryana with an annual capacity of 1.65 million units. To meet the ever increasing
demands of the products, Honda has started operations of its second plant in
Tapukara, District Alwar, Rajasthan. Expanding to full operations, Honda
production capacity has jumped 30% year on year to 2.8 million per annum in FY
12- 13.

Honda’s third plant at Narsapura Industrial Area near Bengaluru, Karnataka is

equipped to manufacture 1.2 million units. Utilizing production technologies
refined at Manesar & Tapukara plants as starting point, the 3rd plant is employed
with state-of-the-art manufacturing, automation and environment friendly
technologies to deliver quality products.

On February 17 2016, Honda inaugurated the “World’s largest only scooter plant"
at Vithalapur Gujarat with annual capacity of 1.2 million units. The new plant will
employ approximately 3000 people within first 2 years of commercial production.
 REASON TO GO FOR AUTOMATION
 To increase labor productivity

 To reduce labor cost

 To mitigate the effects of labor shortages

 To reduce or eliminate routine manual and clerical tasks

 To improve worker safety

 To improve product quality

 To reduce manufacturing lead time

 To accomplish processes that cannot be done manually

 To avoid the high cost of not automating

 HONDA PRODUCTION SYSTEM

Since the demand of motorcycle in global market is increasing, Honda need to

response to the evolution by strengthen the Honda Production System . Honda
plans to shift from the medium motorcycles to the large one and recently, the
company is trying to strengthen the automatic transmissions production system
(AT) because the demand of transmission gears is steadily growing. This factory
will also transfer the cutting-edge production technology to the Honda site across
the world.

Honda is focusing on “the global flexible production system” as the growth is

expanding in many regions such as in Asia and South America, they have to
increase the capabilities to respond the flexible changes that occur in the business
environment. In other word, this production system can flexibly respond to the
demand in diversity range of models. Lately Honda is launching its production
plants not only in North America and Canada but also in the Asia region like
Thailand. Moreover, Honda is also renovate the new technologies and production
system while maintain the high standards of its business.
Even though, Honda is offering the high quality product to the customers with
attractive styles, Honda is also concern about the environment and safety issue so
they manage the campaigns for these purposes through working as a team and
sharing joy to people. Every year, Honda arranges the activities associated with the
education, environment, traffic safety and community initiatives around the world.

Honda’s main important part is to maintain the production efficiency by maximize

the cost and minimize the storage and any other wastes. Many hundred parts of car
need to be available according to “Just in Time” basis. Also Honda has the best
supply’s based program among other Japanese automotive industry by developing
great suppliers rather than exploit the existing ones. The improvement of Honda is
never stop by inventing the new innovation all the time. Honda pay attention to the
environmental issue so they are invented the hybrid cars that need no fossil fuels.
And for the motorcycles, the company has developed the use of fuel injection
system. Honda did not only make the improvement in the productions but also put
the improvement in its quality and its employees. Therefore, Honda becomes the
number 1 company in creating new value to the customers.
 Different types automation in the plant
Automation in car parts assembly:
 Honda’s integrated IT and production department reduces production complexity
arising from multiple PLC and automation software implementations by keeping
its systems largely in place and adopting a new interoperability approach.

Like most large manufacturing facilities, Honda Manufacturing of Alabama faced

a common problem—an array of different automation system components. Some
of these systems were custom designed for the plant’s operations, which meant that
additional customization was required each time a new device was introduced.

The complexity created by the diverse array of automation systems in the facility—
all of which were introduced to streamline production—turned out to be slowing
operations down. And that was a big problem for the 3.7 million square foot plant
facility, which happens to be Honda’s largest light truck production facility in the
world and the sole manufacturer of the Odyssey minivan, Pilot sport utility vehicle,
Ridgeline pickup truck, the Acura MDX, and V-6 engines.

Operations performed at the plant include steel and aluminum blanking, stamping,
welding, painting, plastic injection molding, aluminum casting, aluminum
machining, ferrous machining, vehicle sub-assembly and assembly, engine
assembly, vehicle testing and quality assurance. At capacity, the plant produces
about 360,000 vehicles and engines per year; thus the reason for so many disparate
automation systems in existence at the plant.

To make better use of these different systems, increase commonality between tools
and plants, and improve data quality, Honda’s plant floor IT managers were
challenged with integrating disparate PLCs from Omron, Rockwell, and Mitsubishi
with proprietary manufacturing execution system (MES) applications, Hollis
Technologies’ Active plant for data analytics, as well as IBM’s DB2 and
Microsoft’s SQL database software.

Layered on top of these legacy systems, Honda—like most other manufacturing

facilities—had been deploying an array of smart devices on the plant floor and
embedding IT devices in plant equipment. These devices increased the amount of
data generated by the production process and, at times, slowed down PLC scan
times due to the increased data handling required. As a result, Honda needed to
find a way to improve IT resources with simple common tools.
To address this challenge, Honda reorganized to bring IT and plant floor operations
into one department for a central focus on production processes and supporting
technology.

Honda’s first step towards this goal was to reduce custom code, which touched on
everything integrated into the MES tracking application stack—from device
drivers and program logic to configuration and application interfaces. The team
began by investigating the equipment interfaces with a plan to migrate to a single
vendor provided OPC-based solution. Their goal was to reduce the time required—
typically six weeks—to write drivers to connect to equipment every time a new
device was added to the plant floor.

The problem was that nearly all the systems Honda investigated required custom
code to integrate their various manufacturing systems. This is exactly what the
company was trying to avoid.

After more research into available options, Honda deployed the device
wise industrial automation platform to bring everything into one common
interface. Designed to operate within an enterprise, device wise (which runs on
multiple platforms, such as Windows, Linux, AIX, etc.) connects and integrates
production machines and processes with existing enterprise resource planning
(ERP), manufacturing resource planning (MRP) systems, and SCADA
applications. This capability enabled Honda to bring its blended systems—custom
and OPC packages—into one common interface.

Honda can run device Wise locally or communicate to the enterprise inside their
data center and back to the factory floor. The IT department found that it can now
collect data downstream and have nested information or devices below that,
thereby creating a small, common architecture and then feeding the data up to the
enterprise into the large systems such as the ERP or MES systems.

Another benefit Honda derived from the device Wise system is the ability to
handle large data sets sent from newer, more intelligent production devices with
faster scan rate capability. For example, in Honda’s system, the history of a part
serial number was retained in the PLCs. However, adding more data to the PLCs
slowed the overall scan times, which could, at times, lead to missing data.
Implementing the device wise solution enabled Honda to: simplify the plant device
configuration, make the complex business logic buried in the application available
to the plant device, remove complex ladder logic, and use a cheaper platform to
write logic. It also meant that Honda could use the enterprise system to store and
search the larger data set while not impacting the PLC scan rate and improving
performance.
Automated Engine Assembly and Transportation
AN ENGINE IS HANDLED BY ONE OF THE FACTORIES ROBOTS
Automating the Line with Welding Robots
Japan emerged as a key worldwide auto exporter in 1980. As export volumes
increased, Japanese automobile manufacturers were asked to improve the paint
quality of their cars in order to provide sufficient corrosion resistance in certain
regions of the U.S. and Europe, where vehicles were subject to damage from the
application of salt to icy winter roadways. The manufacturers were also asked to
improve the exterior quality of their cars in the hope of answering an emerging
consumer preference for expensive-looking cars.

WELDING ROBOTS:
The sealing process used a robot with a larger operating range that was ideal for
wide application areas. The undercoating robot was capable of applying a coating
over the bottom surface of the floor without using masking tape. The use of a dual-
head spraygun allowed the robot to handle different coating specifications for
multiple models, helping integrate the process.

Most automobiles then employed a triple-coat, triple-bake coating system - the so-
called standard process - except for certain luxury models. In this system the body
was first cleaned in a pretreatment process before passing through the electro-
deposition coating process to receive the rust-prevention treatment. The rust-
proofed body was then forwarded to the surface-preparation processes: first to the
sealing process, where sealant was applied along the seams between steel sheets
for waterproofing and dust-proofing; and then to the undercoating application
process, where a protective coating was applied to the underside of the floorpan in
order to inhibit rust and excessive vibration.
A Unique Coating Robot – Automated painting
machine
SPRAYING PROCESS IN THE PLANT
The angle at which material is sprayed from the gun head is critical to the coating
process, as is the gun head speed of movement. Moreover, a distance must be
constantly maintained between the gun head and body surface. Through years of
experience, the operators learn to control the gun head using their bodies and
senses. For example, in the actual coating process they stop the gun just before the
coating material being sprayed onto the surface would start to run. The coating
film they create is even in all areas, with precision ensured down to a level of
microns.

Before this kind of expertise could be passed on to the robot, each separate
technique would have to be analyzed in detail. Of course, the skilled operators
were also human beings; they simply could not give their very best performance
time after time. Therefore, the team recorded its coating operation on video in
order to pinpoint the optimal actions. Next, the most effective gun actions were
chosen according to three criteria: the spray angle of coating material at the gun
head, distance from the body, and the gun's speed of movement. Teaching sheets
were then created in order to transplant the coating techniques to the robot.
Types of transportation and storage systems in
the plants
In 1963, Honda opened its first overseas factory to manufacture motorbikes. Over
the years, the company’s business model has evolved to become an OEM supplier
and spare parts company. Parts are manufactured at various Honda plants then
shipped to one centralized location for storage and distribution before going out to
Honda dealers in the network. While consolidating storage and distribution into
one centralized DC was a strategic business move, moving the parts presented a
materials handling challenge.

Honda parts arrive at the distribution facility on a variety of carriers such as pallets,
crates, trolleys and box pallets all with different dimensions. To handle the
diversity, Honda chose a versatile automatic guided vehicle (AGV) system to
transport product containers across inbound and outbound locations, and to
intermediate storage locations.

Since the AGV system was installed, Honda has a more orderly transport of goods
throughout the distribution center and a significant reduction in damaged goods
due to the precision fork placement and controlled travel speeds.

The automated process starts when the inbound operator scans the load type and
the load’s position. Then the system determines the zone to which the load must
arrive. This triggers the AGV control system to send an AGV to the designated
location.

The control system also sends the correct parameters to the AGV for accurate fork
positioning. The AGV forks can be individually adjusted to fit the various fork
pockets of the carriers so it efficiently moves product, regardless of whether the
carrier is a pallet, crate, trolley or box pallet.

Honda has also experienced improvements to personnel productivity. Prior to the

AGV system, lift truck drivers delivered racks of products, which were large and
required a number moves per hour to keep up. Since installing the AGVs, Honda
has been able to reassign drivers to new positions and let the AGVs handle the long
distance transport of goods.
Different types of AGV’s and storage systems
 Products by Honda manufacturing
 Automobile
Honda Cars entered the Indian market in 1995 with a focus on offering premium
passenger cars packed with the latest technology. Since then, the brand has enjoyed
varying degrees of success with the City sedan being their most popular model
over multiple generations of the vehicle. Honda recently introduced the all-new
CR-V SUV with a 7-seater option as well. The Honda Amaze sub-4m compact
sedan retails in high numbers as well with the 2018 model already recording sales
of over 50,000 units within five months of launch.

The company also has a hybrid model in its range called the Accord premium
sedan which is sold as a CBU unit, imported from Thailand. Honda has plans to
introduce a mass-market electrified vehicle in India by 2021. The Japanese
carmaker has invested heavily in India over the years with two manufacturing
facilities - one in U.P. and the other in Rajasthan. Honda has also created a large
sales and distribution network across the country with 341 facilities in 231 cities.

At present, Honda has two plants in India, one in Greater Noida and the other in
Tapukara, Rajasthan.

Some automobiles by honda

  Motorcycles
Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India, Private Limited (HMSI) is the wholly owned
Indian subsidiary of Honda Motor Company, Limited, Japan. Founded in 1999, it
was the fourth Honda automotive venture in India, after Kinetic Honda Motor Ltd
(1984-1998), Hero Honda (1984-2011) and Honda Siel Cars India (1995-2012).
HMSI was established in 1999 at Manesar, District Gurgaon, Haryana.
Currently HMSI has four manufacturing locations at Manesar in Haryana,
Tapukara in Rajasthan, Narsapura, Kolar in Karnataka and Vithalpur, NW of
Ahmedabad.
Scooter -exclusive plant in Gujarat. Its facility in Narsapura is the largest amongst
its four locations and has a capacity of 6,600 vehicles per day. Honda India sales
skyrocketed up to 4.28 million motorcycles and scooters backed by scooterization
of India via bestselling scooter Activa over 350,000 scooter sales in September
2017. Honda scooter Activa sales record expected 3.5million scooters in 2017/18.
Honda motorcycle & scooter started independent operation since 2010s after
separation from Hero Honda motors J/V since 1984. 6 million production capacity
establishment within 7 years record in India, Top world motorcycle market.

Products by honda:
  Power equipments
Production started in 1953 with H-type engine (prior to motorcycle).

Honda power equipment reached record sales in 2007 with 6.4 million units. By
2010 (Fiscal year ended 31 March) this figure had decreased to 4,7 million units.
Cumulative production of power products has exceeded 85 million units (as of
September 2008).

Honda power equipment includes:

 Engine

 Tiller

 Lawn mower

 Robotic lawn mower

 Riding mower

 Trimmer

 Mower

 Blower

 Sprayer

 Hedge trimmer

 Snow thrower

 Generator, welding power supply

 Pumps

 Outboard engine

 Inflatable boat

 Electric 4-wheel Scooter

Some of the power equipment products:
Electric and alternative fuel vehicles
 Compressed natural gas
 Flexible-fuel
 Hybrid electric
 Hydrogen fuel cell
 Plug-in electric vehicles