Computer-guided system for design of factories

Abstract

To stay competitive at the start of the 21st century, manufacturing companies are in great need of support for designing/redesigning their production systems in accordance with the drastically, rapidly and frequently changing environment. Our aim is to develop a computer-guided system for the design of factories in the manufacturing industry. As a first step, a hybrid reference model for factory design is presented in this paper to describe the necessary design actions carried out during the process of factory design. According to the reference model, the general design actions together with their corresponding techniques are categorized. Different participants are working on these design activities, each representing the opinion from disciplines inside or outside the company in a distributed cooperative way with equal authorities but heterogeneous knowledge. To control effectively the interactions among the cooperating designers from different departments, a computer guidance method of the process of design of a factory based on the concept of a multi-agent system is presented. Several agents represent users (participants in the factory design process) to the system and the coordination mechanism of the system handles complex interactions with other cooperating agents and system resources. The aim is a better coordination of the interactions of design steps in each of the activities and a more effective management of the entire design process. A prototype software system is presented.