Efficient manufacturing system implementation based on combination between real and virtual factory

Abstract

At present, before real factories are implemented on the shop floor, methods to evaluate facility control programs for equipment, such as ladder programs for programmable logic controllers (PLC) while mixing and synchronizing real equipment and virtual factory models on the computers, have not been developed. Digital data as virtual factory models which are defined at a design stage cannot be re-used at an implementation stage. These difficulties stop precise and rapid support of a manufacturing system engineering process from the design stage to the implementation stage. In this paper, an intermediation environment to connect real factories and virtual factories is first proposed. This environment consists of a distributed real manufacturing simulation environment (DRMSE) and a distributed simulation environment (DSE). Then DRMSE, which creates evaluating facility control programs while mixing and synchronizing real equipment and virtual factory models before real factories are implemented, is proposed in detail. Production facilities simulators which simulate facility behaviours using signals and data from a real world, and a soft-wiring system which logically wire real world data and simulation world data on the production facilities simulator, are proposed in DRMSE. Finally work was carried out to evaluate the performance of cooperative work.