Digitalization of Process Planning of Spot Welding in Body-in-white

Process planning of spot welding for body-in-white automobile structures involves several experimental (physical) welding trials to set the process parameters. These experimental trials are crucial in ensuring the quality and efficiency of the process. However, due to the iterative nature of the work, running several experiments is costly and time consuming prolonging the overall development cost and time significantly. To minimize the cost and time, replacing the physical tests by digital (virtual) tests is an established approach although not often applied for spot welding. However, for a long chain of development process with several iterative loops, this is not a trivial task considering the availability of information and continuity of the work flow. This paper reports the work and results of an industrial case study conducted on spot welding of a body-in-white car pillar in a Swedish auto manufacturer. The aim of the study is to investigate and propose the necessary conditions required to replace a physical test by virtual tests in terms of validity and expedited execution of the process. Information sharing, knowledge reuse and streamlining the work flow have found to be critical condition for valid and rapid virtual tests.