가상 모델을 통한 스마트공장 Programmable Logical Controller 전문가 양성을 위한 훈련 시스템

Abstract

These days, smart manufacturing has received growing attention and is leading a new trends in the manufacturing field. To keep up with this trend, it is required to improve the education program of manufacturing engineers in term of trainee quantity as well as program quality. However, these education programs relatively have limited resources due to huge requests of smart manufacturing training. The authors propose the framework for smart manufacturing education based on a virtual reality composed of both virtual PLC and virtual facility. We applied this framework to existing training kit which is currently being used for smart manufacturing training. We chose commercial PLC programming tool as a virtual PLC machine and adopted standardized industrial communication protocol to ensure the connectivity between different platforms. The virtual plant was firstly modeled by using CAD, later was imported to 3D game engine to implement physical property. The 3D game engine has the advantage of a possible extension to virtual reality. By doing so we made a full virtual training environment as effective as the real training kit.