DISTRIBUTED VIRTUAL MANUFACTURING FOR DEVELOPMENT OF MODULAR MACHINE SYSTEMS

Abstract

To support all phases of an agile modular manufacturing machine life cycle with CAE and Virtual Manufacturing tools, a number of different engineering applications (e.g. specialist software based tools) are typically used for design, simulation, analysis, programming, control and monitoring of a machine. These applications mainly exist today as small applications islands where each of them manages their own data. When a manufacturing machine is designed, simulated, programmed, analyzed, tested, or operated, the information, connected to that specific machine, used and generated by each application island is stored separately by each application. These application islands often use different storage technologies. Each one of the applications has an information structure to separate the information connected to each machine; however, they do not necessarily use the same information structure. Another issue concerning these applications is the functionality that is implemented in them to manage information; namely, processes such as store, retrieve, search, permissions, etc. The functionality for one process is the same in all applications that has the process implemented. But the implementation of the process functionality may differ, due to misinterpretation of the functionality specification and regular implementation bugs, which could lead to problem with integrity and consistency of the data. Applications that make use of newer information technologies, such as databases and software development tools can simplify the implementation of the functionality but each application still has to implement their own version of the functionality. This paper presents a research investigation focused on the development of a distributed integration platform that supports the whole life cycle of agile modular machine systems, which includes the design, simulation, programming, analysis, machine operation and re-configuration. The environment supports distributed management and storage of information in a system-wide library, information management and storage that is machine oriented, not application oriented, and information storage structured as reusable components to enable reuse of information and know-how that is produced throughout the life cycle of machines.