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The vacuum forming process for plastic parts is used to manufacture packages as well as any kind of industrial appliance for a range of sectors, including the automotive industry. This diversity of uses is due to the attractive cost of the process. In the automotive industry, it is a big ally, used as an alternative process in the manufacture of prototype parts. This occurs not only because of the reduction in the time to obtain the part, but also the technical opportunity of product development allowed by this process due to the material that can be used. Some analyses and developments would not be possible if the part were manufactured using the material specified by the part design. This paper shows how the vacuum forming process can facilitate the development of automotive vehicles, as well as a simple and fast way to manufacture vacuum formed parts, which allows parts to be obtained by any kind of industry.

Automotive industries are undergoing a transformation of their manufacturing systems. Called by the German government as Industrie 4.0, this transformation is based on the evolution of traditional Embedded Systems-ES to Cyber-Physical Systems-CPS. In the next years such evolution will have to reach transitory stages, where ES and CPS should coexist for a determined period of time (ES-CPS). Based on this projection, this work compares ES with CPS, identifies the main differences between these systems and thus forms a transitory stage of automotive manufacturing for the next years. The work is structured as follows: Introduction section places the reader on the treated subject and presents the methodology of the work. Later, Industrie 4.0, Embedded Systems (ES) and Cyber-Physical systems (CPS) are defined. Once this is done, the analysis of ES-CPS transition is finished. Analysis results are presented and a representation of ES-CPS transition is proposed.

In the automotive industries, time and parts production costs are fundamental, mainly in prototyping production. The RTV (Room Temperature Vulcanized) process is an important alternative production to flexible silicone molds when you need to inject polyurethane parts. The objective is time reduction in tooling production and parts. RTV requires notable initial investments in equipments. Many times, this cost does not fit in the automotive third part company's budget. This work shows how is possible to obtain parts by RTV process with excellent quality, without high investments in equipments and without quality loss in produced parts. Lead times and tooling and parts costs are analyzed. Due to equipments low costs, this alternative is accessible not only to automotive industries but also to small and medium suppliers.

Concurrent engineering principles have been almost universally adopted as the ideal solution to the reduction in time for products development. Even with concurrency practice, the lack of interaction among the professionals is still present in some stages of the product development process (PDP). This lack of interaction, or gap, may be observed in the three macro-phases of PDP: macro-phase of product strategy (PS); macro-phase of product and process development (PPD); macro-phase of production and continuous improvement (PCI). The present work aims to propose a methodology, denominated Technical Interface (TI), as an aid to automotive product development process (Automotive-PDP). This methodology can contribute to the engineering departments in charge of PS; PPD and PCI for the update and preservation of technical information about product; process, and production, during all the Automotive-PDP.

This work was motivated by the specific needs of a materials flow and packing planning sector (PFME), within a manufacturing engineering department of a vehicle assembly company in Brazil. In this sector, there is a growing need to obtain prototype parts in the shortest time and at the lowest cost possible in order to carry out static prototype tests of the special packing and transportation racks used in this company, since these racks need to be ready to assist the preparation phase of the series production of the vehicle. The objective of this work is to survey the academic theory and the existing literature in order to find an application proposal of rapid prototyping (RP) techniques to make the parts used in the rack tests, thus reducing time and acquisition costs.

The competition among automotive industries increases each year worldwide. Traditional industries as well as traditional markets end up becoming the target for expansion of new global industries. It can be stated that automotive industries dedicate special attention to lean thinking and Toyota Production System (TPS). This attention is not by chance as, in doing so, these companies obtain competitive advantages over their competitors, such as: improved profitability, higher negotiation margin, the possibility of applying lower selling prices of their products, among others. This study aims to present several waste examples, as well as many activities that regularly occur within the production process of automotive industries (some both in product and process design). These activities form part of the final cost of the vehicle although without adding value to the final product for the customer.

The Digital Factory (DF) can be defined as a set of computational software applied in the manufacturing design, development, implementation and operation. The goal of this work is to investigate DF's available resources in the analysis of workforce and machinery required for changes in the production scenarios in a determined automobile model. Therefore, a theoretical framework is developed. Afterwards, there is an investigation of the resources available for this application, actually commercialized by the three main software supply companies for DF. The results of the research are presented and discussed. Suggestions for future developments are identified, and the work is finished with the pertinent considerations.