Virtual Fusion: Integrating Virtual Components into a Physical Manufacturing System

Abstract

Current manufacturing operations are increasingly pushed to boost profits through improved efficiency and quality. A common approach to enhance production is through the adoption of new machines, modified production schedules, and the integration of new products. Existing methods for validating the impact of these modifications either ignore the physical implementation challenges through only simulation-based analysis or require costly run off processes on the physical system. To mitigate these limitations, this paper presents a virtual fusion environment in which the physical and simulated systems are run simultaneously, enabling real-time analysis and integration of virtual parts within the physical manufacturing system. A virtual fusion filter is used to synchronize and augment input signals to a local controller to represent the physical effects of a given process on a virtual part within the physical system. Experimental results on a reconfigurable manufacturing test platform demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.