INTEGRATION OF REAL-TIME CONTROL SIMULATION TO A VIRTUAL MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

This paper presents a new integrated approach for simulation developed to improve the accuracy of virtual manufacturing environments. While machine tool simulation and virtual manufacturing for factory simulation have been frequently used in early stage plant development, each of these technique has been researched and implemented separately. This paper focuses on the utilization of real-time simulation of machine tools or active axes in manufacturing systems and integration of this simulation capability with virtual manufacturing environments. Machine-level simulation results are generated in real-time with a real machine tool controller and are fed to a virtual manufacturing environment. To integrate these two simulation techniques, system-level software is utilized as a communication platform. This system-level software was originally developed to control and configure whole manufacturing systems. The method has been successfully implemented within a testbed with full-scale machine tools. The results demonstrate that the proposed method advances the virtual manufacturing environments toward improved accuracy of factory level simulation, reduced effort for modeling and expanded functionality of machine-level simulations.