Meritor, Inc. is a leading global supplier of drivetrain, mobility, braking, aftermarket and electric powertrain solutions for commercial vehicle and industrial markets.
With more than a 110-year legacy of providing innovative products that offer superior performance, efficiency and reliability, the company serves commercial truck, trailer, off-highway, defence, speciality and aftermarket customers around the world. Meritor is based in Troy, Michigan, United States, and is made up of more than 8,600 diverse employees who apply their knowledge and skills in manufacturing facilities, engineering centres, joint ventures, distribution centres and global offices in 19 countries. Meritor common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol MTOR.
Meritor HVS AB in Lindesberg, Sweden manufactures rear and front axles for heavy vehicle applications. The plants comprise both machining and assembly. The order horizon for assembly as well as the assembly process itself are short which allows the planning process to meet the customer needs.
For the machining department, we have longer lead times which forces us to consider order forecasts for planning. Together with a complex machine park with numerous different process steps and different machines with different cycle times depending on the part produced, this makes planning hard.
Today the planner operates day by day, using data on the availability of parts and comes up with a production plan based on what we know at this time. However this is a very time-consuming process and in reality, the results are almost every time wrong as changes such as machine breakdowns or unaccomplished target cycle times have occurred during the planning process. This leads to sub-planning activities in the machining departments that focus on the individual department only and as a consequence to an imperfect overall exploitation of resources.
We expect AIPlan4EU technology to provide the means to create a planning tool that will provide decision options for the central human planners to make decisions in real-time, based on accurate data for controlling the production.
Role in the project: As one of the project’s industrial partners, Meritor will lead the task of identifying and describing the planning problem emerging in each use-case and clarifying its objective. Meritor will also contribute with its own use case: a flexible manufacturing use-case
To learn more about Meritor, please visit their website: www.meritor.com