The overall purpose of this project is to devise improved quality acceptance procedures to examine quality characteristics of utility poles at the factory of the supplier (FAT) and on-site upon receipt by the customer (SAT). To that end, the thesis draws upon available standards, literature, and industry practices regarding wood, fiberglass and steel poles. As far as the design of the research, a single case study of a major power company was chosen. Then, a data collection plan was developed in order to build upon the existing knowledge found in the literature, and upon the data that can be collected from three of the Company’s suppliers, in addition to the Technical Research Institute of Sweden (SP). Documents’ analysis, interviews, observations, and a survey were the tools of that plan. It was found that criteria, inspection and test methods of wood poles are all sufficiently covered in the standards and the literature; for wood is the most commonly used material for utility poles. Next, in coverage of research, are the steel poles; while there is currently no standard that covers fiberglass utility poles. Indeed, quality characteristics, criteria, and acceptance procedures can altogether form parts of a sustainable solution, as long as the quality is managed as a process whether at the Company’s end or at the fabrication sites; that is especially true if there is some form of backward partnership between the Company and its suppliers.

Genom att använda sig utav en virtuell kopia utav en produktionscell kan programmering och funktionstester av olika paneler testas i ett tidigt stadie. En virtuell kopia bidrar också till enklare felsökning och minskning av kostnader vid idrifttagning. Tanken med projektet är att undersöka i vilken utsträckning som emuleringsmodellen kan ersätta den riktiga cellen vid ett funktionstest för leverantören. Det som också undersöks är i vilken utsträckning riktiga CAD-ritningar kan användas och vilka krav som ställs på ritningarna för att underlätta emulering. Projektet hade flera utmaningar och en av dem som uppkom under projektets gång var problemet med att det inte gick att emulera säkerhetssystemen. Detta löstes genom att bygla alla säkerhetskretsar i PLC-programmet. En viktig del i emulering är kommunikation mellan de olika programvarorna i systemet. I projektets visade det sig fördelaktigt att dela upp programmen i emuleringssystemet för att fördela resurserna över tre datorer. Att använda sig utav en emuleringsmodell istället för en riktig produktionscell är fortfarande i forskningsstadiet men genom projektet har många användningsområden identifierats och skulle kunna förändra idrifttagning i framtiden. / Using a virtual twin of a production cell, makes it possible for programming and different functional testing of panels to be performed in early stages of development. A virtual twin contributes to a simpler debugging and to identify problems and minimize cost in commissioning of the production cell. The aim for the project is to investigate how well an emulated cell will perform compared to the real production cell in a factory acceptance test. Another objective is to investigate how you can use real CAD models in the emulation and what type of criteria the models should meet. The project had a lot of challenges and one of them was the difficulty to emulate the safety systems. This was solved by bypassing the safety in the PLC program. One important thing about emulation is communication between the different software used in the system. In this project, it proved successful to distribute the software on three computers to ease the workload of the programs used in the emulation. To use the emulated model instead of the real system is still in the research phase but in this project a lot of useful applications could be identified that could change commissioning in the future.