XL Assembly: New Center Production Engineering Cluster

As the ninth center in the Production Engineering Cluster on RWTH Aachen Campus, XL Assembly will in future build up an industry consortium that will jointly design, test, integrate and experience innovative technologies for the industrial assembly of the future. This novel Center ws initiated by the Laboratory for Machine Tools WZL of RWTH Aachen University.

To this end, a variety of disciplines from industry and research are bundled to develop and test practical solutions in agile projects. Various areas are involved in the industrial assembly of the future, which are considered holistically: From workplace design and automation to production control and organisation.

So far, mainly companies from the health and automotive industries have promised to work closely with the center in the future. Together with the companies, XL Assembly is looking for solutions to market-related uncertainties such as sales fluctuations, constantly increasing product variance, an ageing society, wage cost pressure and sustainability. To this end, the XL Assembly, together with its members from research and industry, uses the unique research infrastructure on RWTH Aachen Campus to test large components in practical environments. The current flagship project is the “Line-less Mobile Assembly Demonstrator”, in which, together with the WZL, the assembly of the future is being tested using truck frame assembly.