The growing number of product variants, smaller lot sizes, accelerated time-to-market and shorter life-cycles of products have led to increasing demands on assembly equipment and concepts. They must realise high flexibility related to variants, low cost adaptability of products, and quick amortisation within a sustainable equipment concept. In order to master these challenges, innovative approaches and technologies are required. The performance of existing automation techniques is often insufficient. As a solution to this problem, hybrid, i.e. human-integrated, approaches are proposed.

The idea is to combine human flexibility, intelligence and skills with the advantages of sophisticated technical systems. Such systems should help the human worker instead of replace him. Intelligent assist systems IAS offer a rational, advanced method for the assembly of complex products on demand and at significantly reduced cost. Since today neither the technology nor the tools for the planning and management of IAS are available, the aim of the project is their prototypical development, incl. demonstrations based on use-cases. One breakthrough of this project shall be to fill the gap between manual and automated assembly by introducing novel IAS technology and providing planning and integration tools to make this new technology applicable. At second breakthrough shall be reached by the re-configurability of assembly systems and the reusability of assembly equipment. On the one hand, this is related to a modular structure of assembly systems incl. standard hardware- and software-interfaces of assembly equipment. On the other hand, methods and tools are needed for reconfiguration planning, re-programming, life-cycle and equipment management, and knowledge-bases for assembly solutions. Each of these breakthroughs shall lead to an increase of the production capacity and productivity, to reduce the investment and re-arrangement cost, and to react faster to market demands.