[{"jcr:title":"Insper's partnership with Mercedes-Benz and USP creates a simulator for the industry","cq:tags_0":"area-de-conhecimento:engenharia","cq:tags_1":"area-de-conhecimento:tecnologia","cq:tags_2":"tipos-de-conteudo:acontece-no-insper/parcerias","cq:tags_3":"programas:graduacao"},{"richText":"The computational solution was developed during a summer program guided by Professors Luiz Durão and Rafael Marzolla","authorDate":"01/10/2025 11h11","author":"Leandro Steiw","madeBy":"Por","tag":"area-de-conhecimento:engenharia","title":"Insper's partnership with Mercedes-Benz and USP creates a simulator for the industry","variant":"image"},{"jcr:title":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"themeName":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"containerType":"containerTwo"},{"jcr:title":"Grid Container Section","layout":"responsiveGrid"},{"jcr:title":"Student Melina Belli Stergiou with Professors Luiz Fernando Durão and Rafael Amoroso Marzolla (the first two from the left) and the Mercedes-Benz team","fileName":"Mercedes-Benz_foto_apresentacao_final_grupo_02.jpg","alt":"A aluna Melina Belli Stergiou com os professores Luiz Fernando Durão e Rafael Amoroso Marzolla (os dois primeiros a partir da esq.) e equipe da Mercedes-Benz"},{"text":"Students participating in a summer program developed a computational simulator for the Mercedes-Benz do Brasil truck assembly line, located in São Bernardo do Campo (SP). Over six weeks, from July to August, Melina Belli Stergiou , an eighth-semester Mechanical Engineering student at Insper, worked alongside two Engineering students from the University of São Paulo (USP). She was guided by Insper professors Luiz Fernando Durão and Rafael Amoroso Marzolla , and accompanied by Mercedes-Benz engineers Lucas Tolardo and Eduardo Bertti, as well as managers Marcos Marsola and Rafael Gazi. For some time, Durão — who also teaches at USP’s Polytechnic School, in the Department of Production Engineering — had been interested in creating opportunities for students to gain firsthand experience with truck industry operations. At the same time, Mercedes-Benz was seeking suggestions to optimize its Brazilian assembly line operations. This mutual interest gave rise to the “Digital Immersion Challenge”, designed as an intensive, hands-on program to develop innovative digital transformation and Industry 4.0 solutions for the company’s factories. From the applicants, Melina was selected to represent Insper. Students and professors made several visits to the factory to understand how the truck assembly line worked, identifying ten potential scenarios for improving production in São Bernardo do Campo. According to Marzolla, the team developed a simulator to initially address three priority scenarios. In the final simulation, the operator workload balance was improved, with the same production output but reduced idle time. The new tool was programmed in Python using the Pandas and SymPy libraries, applied in data science and symbolic mathematics. The results exceeded the partners’ expectations. “Especially when we consider that this was the students’ first time stepping into a factory of Mercedes-Benz’s scale, which was extremely open and provided us with plenty of information and support,” said Marzolla. The scenarios were tested in multiple simulation rounds, even helping validate some of the tools the company already used internally. According to Marzolla, the project’s main outcome was the line simulator, which will allow for more accurate calculations of the factory’s daily production capacity for future product launches, whether trucks or buses. “These extracurricular projects are very valuable because students aren’t motivated only by grades,” he explained. “They know the project contributes to their professional development, both in soft and hard skills. These are abilities we can’t fully teach in the classroom, no matter how practical the activities are. It’s also a type of applied research we really value — addressing a real company’s needs while connecting academia and industry, and integrating students into the job market.” Melina echoed her professor’s view: “I joined the challenge because I’m in the final semesters of my program, and it’s increasingly important to strengthen connections with companies and the job market. I had only visited smaller factories outside the automotive sector. So, visiting a Mercedes-Benz factory — which is not always feasible during the course because many plants are far away — and working with students from another university I had never met before, to develop a project in just a month and a half, was a great experience. The biggest challenge was communication and teamwork. But in the job market, you face similar challenges because nobody works alone, especially in the industry.” As Melina emphasized, Insper’s Mechanical Engineering program exposes students to the many career paths in the field. “In this project, I mainly drew on production and process mapping. My manufacturing classes helped a lot, since we learned about the relationship between scalability and product variability in industries with assembly lines like Mercedes-Benz. On top of that, I used knowledge I didn’t expect to need as a mechanical engineer — programming. Now I see that the program really teaches us to code, because even the little exposure I had was enough to handle a project like this,” she said. In late August, the simulation results were presented to Mercedes-Benz production managers. Marzolla believes the initiative could eventually lead to a Capstone project — the final thesis for Engineering and Computer Science students — which is always developed in partnership with companies and guided by professionals in the field."}]