Abstract
The manufacturing industry has witnessed rapid changes, including unpredictable product demand, diverse customer requirements, and increased pressure to launch new products. To deal with such changes, the reconfigurable manufacturing system has been proposed as one of the advanced manufacturing systems that is close to the realisation of smart manufacturing since it is able to reconfigure its hardware, software, and system structures in a much quicker manner. Conventional simulation technologies lack convergence with physical manufacturing systems, and reconfigurable manufacturing lines require the manual construction of production line models for each reconfiguration. This study presents a digital twin-based integrated reconfiguration assessment application that synchronises with real-time manufacturing data and provides accurate, automated simulation functionality to build and analyse a manufacturing system. The paper discusses the architectural design and implementation of the application, an information model, and an assessment model that enable quantitatively assessment on reconfigurations of manufacturing systems from various aspects. The effectiveness of the proposed application is verified via application to an automotive parts production line to assess the reconfiguration indicators of the manufacturing system under different scenarios. The results reveal that the proposed application provides faster and more accurate reconfiguration assessments compared to existing methods. The findings of this study are expected to facilitate accurate and consistent decision making for evaluating the various indicators of production line performance.
Highlights
With the advent of globalisation, the manufacturing industry has started facing dynamic market changes, such as unpredictable product demand, shortened product lifecycle, and increased demand for customised products [1,2]
A comprehensive check on the results indicates that the accuracy of daily and weekly production is not significantly different from the conventional simulation and Digital twin (DT) simulation results
This study proposed an application based on DT simulation and an assessment model that could comprehensively assess the productivity of the production line, and various elements associated with reconfigurations
Summary
With the advent of globalisation, the manufacturing industry has started facing dynamic market changes, such as unpredictable product demand, shortened product lifecycle, and increased demand for customised products [1,2]. Owing to the rapid development of ICT and the increasingly diverse and complex customer requirements in the 21st century, the new goal is to gain competitiveness in ever-changing and challenging markets by producing new products in the existing manufacturing systems [3,7,8,9]. To meet this goal, a production line of the RMS should have the following six key characteristics to ensure responsiveness while reducing reconfiguration time [1,3,6]
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