SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT FOR MANUFACTURING CELL TO SUPPORT FULL PRODUCTION PERFORMANCE AT PRODUCT LAUNCH

摘要

It is now important to reduce lead-time from the manufacturing system design stage to the manufacturing system implementation stage and support full production performance at the product launch, because manufacturing industries face various problems such as snorter product life cycle. Before a manufacturing system is implemented, it is difficult to complete all the facility control programs for several pieces of equipment used in the manufacturing system currently. Before the real manufacturing system runs, methods to confirm implementation of production management applications, which need to evaluate and improve manufacturing systems at the product launch such as a facility behaviours record application, have not been developed. These difficulties stopped precise and rapid support of a manufacturing engineeringprocess. In order to solve these difficulties, it is necessary to develop a method to mix and synchronize real equipment, virtual factory models on the computers, and production management applications. In our research, in order to reduce the lead-time from the design stage to the implementation stage, a manufacturing engineering environment (MEE) is proposed. MEE consists of a manufacturing cell simulation environment (MCSE) and a distributed simulation environment (DSE). MCSE, which is used to create and evaluate facility control programs while mixing and synchronizing real equipment, virtual factory models, and production management applications before manufacturing systems are implemented, is emphatically proposed in detail. MCSE consists of a manufacturing cell simulator, a soft-wiring system, and ORiN. The manufacturing cell simulator simulates facility behaviours by using data from the soft-wiring system. The soft-wiring system connects real world data, simulation world data on the manufacturing cell simulator, and data on manufacturing management applications without hardwiring. The soft-wiring system also connects manufacturing cell and production management applications. ORiN is a standard distributed network system for manufacturing systems. Finally the case was carried out to evaluate MCSE.