MANUFACTURING CELL SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT SYNCHRONISING REAL EQUIPMENT AND VIRTUAL FACTORY MODEL

摘要

Recently, manufacturing industries face various problems such as shorter product life cycle, more diversified customer needs. In this situation, it is very important to reduce lead-time of manufacturing system constructions. Currently before real factories are implemented, methods to evaluate manufacturing cell control programs on computers such as ladder programs for PLC have not been developed. Digital data as virtual factory models which are defined at a design stage can not be also reused at an implementation stage. Therefore it was not possible to consistently support a manufacturing system engineering process from the design stage to the implementation stage precisely and rapidly. Consequently the lead-time between two stages is long. In this paper, a manufacturing engineering environment to support manufacturing engineering processes using simulation technologies is proposed. The manufacturing engineering environment consists of a manufacturing cell simulation environment and a distributed simulation environment. The manufacturing cell simulation environment which consists of a manufacturing cell simulator and a soft-wiring system is emphatically proposed in detail. The manufacturing cell simulation environment realizes making and evaluating manufacturing cell control programs using virtual factory models on computers before real factories are implemented. Finally the case was carried out to evaluate the performance of cooperative work.