Innovative Solutions for the Covering Process in the Manufacturing of Wire Harnesses to Increase the Automation Degree

The recent trends in the automotive sector are challenging the manufacturers of wire harnesses. Automation, connectivity, and electrification are the key developments for a future car which should on one hand run autonomous and on the other hand have a highly reduced carbon emission. Those advances place higher demands on energy, data and signal transmission which leads to a significant complexity increase of the wiring. Due to their complexity and their impact on its reliability wire harnesses are one of the most important and costly components of modern-day cars. Their labor-intensive production process has seen marginal progress towards a higher degree of automation in recent years and remains predominantly manual. The manual taping process is with over 30% production time proportion one of the most elaborate process of the wire harness manufacturing and represents the highest need for automation and optimization. This paper summarizes the results of a study on alternative processes for replacing the manual taping process and shows further developments and research directions. The study contains the conception and validation of two prototypical test setups for two different coating processes. The research findings identify challenges that can be eliminated by presented further developed solutions.