Abstract

Manufacturing system design is a complex process involving the integration of multiple systems designed by several designers each optimizing sub-systems. The life cycle of manufacturing systems design is also problematic because the size of the manufacturing system makes it incomprehensible by a single person, interdisciplinary in approach, asynchronous in operation, and constantly evolving. This scope also leads to long development times with requirements that are not well understood in the beginning and that change during the design/build cycle. Further, the requirements for the designers are often conflicting and non-functional. Also, individual designs must resolve concurrency issues with other individual designs. These issues are not appropriately addressed by the traditional serial design process. The problems with the current design paradigm for manufacturing systems are also exacerbated by temporal life cycle issues. Because the design life cycle of these systems often span months or years, the inevitable changes during design stages can create costly delays. In view of these issues, then, it is suggested that the manufacturing systems design process must become less serial and more concurrent, as with concurrent product design. Coordinating the design efforts of the multi-disciplinary teams involved in the design of manufacturing systems is a difficult task. These various disciplines utilize different methods and the designers have their own tools for executing these methodologies. Solving these problems requires a new technology which enables prototyping of complex multi-model manufacturing systems. Therefore, an integration technology is proposed that enables the systematic integration of new design tools and thus is readily extendible to include new design domains, methodologies, and technology. In this paper, the manufacturing systems design problem is characterized and an architecture presented which supports manufacturing engineering in this complex, data-rich environment.

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.