Production management and quality assurance for the fabrication of the In-Vessel Components of the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X

•Thousand parts for the divertor, first wall, cooling supply and diagnostics as W7-X In-Vessel Components.•Database building including part and assembly data, work and capacity organization, quality assurance documents.•Production management system to organize the fabrication and the associated quality assurance.•Successful use of an efficient and flexible product planning and scheduling tool for W7-X In-Vessel Components.

The In-Vessel Components (IVC) of the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X consist of the divertor components and the first wall (FW) with their internal water cooling supply and a set of diagnostics. Due to the significant amount of different components, including many variants, a tool called Production Managing System (PMS) has been developed to organize the fabrication and the associated quality assurance. The PMS works by building a database containing the basic parts and assembly data, manufacturing and quality control plans, and available machine capacity. The creation of this database is based mainly on the parts lists, the manufacturing drawings, and details of the working flow organization. As a consequence of the learning process and technical adjustments during the design and manufacturing phase, the database needed to be permanently updated. Therefore an interface tool to optimize the data preparation has been developed. PMS has been demonstrated to be an efficient tool to support the IVC production activities providing reliable planning estimates, easily adaptable to problems encountered during the fabrication and provided a basis for the integration of quality assurance requirements.