A Framework for Automatically Realizing Assembly Sequence Changes in a Virtual Manufacturing Environment

© 2016 The Authors. Global market pressures and the rapid evolution of technologies and materials force manufacturers to constantly design, develop and produce new and varied products to maintain a competitive edge. Although virtual design and engineering tools have been key to supporting this fast rate of change, there remains a lack of seamless integration between and within tools across the domains of product, process, and resource design-especially to accommodate change. This research examines how changes to designs within these three domains can be captured and evaluated within a component based engineering tool (vueOne, developed by the Automation Systems Group at the University of Warwick). This paper describes how and where data within these tools can be mapped to quickly evaluate change (where typically a tedious process of data entry is required) decreasing lead times and cost and increasing productivity. The approach is tested on a sub-assembly of a hydrogen fuel cell, where an assembly system is modelled and changes are made to the sequence which is translated through to control logic. Although full implementation has not yet been realized, the concept has the potential to radically change the way changes are made and the approach can be extended to supporting other change types provided the appropriate rules and mapping

An approach to open virtual commissioning for component-based automation

Increasing market demands for highly customised products with shorter time-to-market and at lower prices are forcing manufacturing systems to be built and operated in a more efficient ways. In order to overcome some of the limitations in traditional methods of automation system engineering, this thesis focuses on the creation of a new approach to Virtual Commissioning (VC). In current VC approaches, virtual models are driven by pre-programmed PLC control software. These approaches are still time-consuming and heavily control expertise-reliant as the required programming and debugging activities are mainly performed by control engineers. Another current limitation is that virtual models validated during VC are difficult to reuse due to a lack of tool-independent data models. Therefore, in order to maximise the potential of VC, there is a need for new VC approaches and tools to address these limitations. The main contributions of this research are: (1) to develop a new approach and the related engineering tool functionality for directly deploying PLC control software based on component-based VC models and reusable components; and (2) to build tool-independent common data models for describing component-based virtual automation systems in order to enable data reusability. [Continues.

A framework for automatically realizing assembly sequence changes in a virtual manufacturing environment

Global market pressures and the rapid evolution of technologies and materials force manufacturers to constantly design, develop and produce new and varied products to maintain a competitive edge. Although virtual design and engineering tools have been key to supporting this fast rate of change, there remains a lack of seamless integration between and within tools across the domains of product, process, and resource design - especially to accommodate change. This research examines how changes to designs within these three domains can be captured and evaluated within a component based engineering tool (vueOne, developed by the Automation Systems Group at the University of Warwick). This paper describes how and where data within these tools can be mapped to quickly evaluate change (where typically a tedious process of data entry is required) decreasing lead times and cost and increasing productivity. The approach is tested on a sub-assembly of a hydrogen fuel cell, where an assembly system is modelled and changes are made to the sequence which is translated through to control logic. Although full implementation has not yet been realized, the concept has the potential to radically change the way changes are made and the approach can be extended to supporting other change types provided the appropriate rules and mapping

A Framework for Pilot Line Scale-up using Digital Manufacturing

Pilot lines are essential test-beds for process and product validation before the establishment of production lines. However, there is a lack of well-defined methodology for pilot line scale-up. To better support this transition, Virtual Models can be integrated with Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) models for potential production-line configurations. However, the validation of the developed models is hardly possible due to the absence of a physical counterpart. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework to increase the accuracy of the DES scale-up models with Virtual Modelling tools and Ontology. Subsequently, a test-case is used to explain the concept

Adaptation of Manufacturing Systems in Dynamic Environment Based on Capability Description Method

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Skill-based reconfiguration of industrial mobile robots

Caused by a rising mass customisation and the high variety of equipment versions, the exibility of manufacturing systems in car productions has to be increased. In addition to a exible handling of production load changes or hardware breakdowns that are established research areas in literature, this thesis presents a skill-based recon guration mechanism for industrial mobile robots to enhance functional recon gurability. The proposed holonic multi-agent system is able to react to functional process changes while missing functionalities are created by self-organisation. Applied to a mobile commissioning system that is provided by AUDI AG, the suggested mechanism is validated in a real-world environment including the on-line veri cation of the recon gured robot functionality in a Validity Check. The present thesis includes an original contribution in three aspects: First, a recon - guration mechanism is presented that reacts in a self-organised way to functional process changes. The application layer of a hardware system converts a semantic description into functional requirements for a new robot skill. The result of this mechanism is the on-line integration of a new functionality into the running process. Second, the proposed system allows maintaining the productivity of the running process and exibly changing the robot hardware through provision of a hardware-abstraction layer. An encapsulated Recon guration Holon dynamically includes the actual con guration each time a recon guration is started. This allows reacting to changed environment settings. As the resulting agent that contains the new functionality, is identical in shape and behaviour to the existing skills, its integration into the running process is conducted without a considerable loss of productivity. Third, the suggested mechanism is composed of a novel agent design that allows implementing self-organisation during the encapsulated recon guration and dependability for standard process executions. The selective assignment of behaviour-based and cognitive agents is the basis for the exibility and e ectiveness of the proposed recon guration mechanism

Measures of reconfigurability and its key characteristics in intelligent manufacturing systems

\In recent years, the fields of reconfigurable manufacturing systems, holonic manufacturing systems, and multi-agent systems have made technological advances to support the ready reconfiguration of automated manufacturing systems. While these technological advances have demonstrated robust operation and been qualitatively successful in achieving reconfigurability, limited effort has been devoted to the measurement of reconfigurability in the resultant systems. Hence, it is not clear (1) to which degree these designs have achieved their intended level of reconfigurability, (2) which systems are indeed quantitatively more reconfigurable and (3) how these designs may overcome their design limitations to achieve greater reconfigurability in subsequent design iterations. Recently, a reconfigurability measurement process based upon axiomatic design knowledge base and the design structure matrix has been developed. Together, they provide quantitative measures of reconfiguration potential and ease. This paper now builds upon these works to provide a set of composite reconfigurability measures. Among these are measures for the key characteristics of reconfigurability: integrability, convertibility, and customization, which have driven the qualitative and intuitive design of these technological advances. These measures are then demonstrated on an illustrative example followed by a discussion of how they adhere to requirements for reconfigurability measurement in automated and intelligent manufacturing systems

Dpws middleware to support agent-based manufacturing control and simulation

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresIn present manufacturing systems, the current challenge is the development of highly reconfigurable, truly distributed solutions. The tendency is to build manufacturing systems with autonomous, intelligent and distributed components that will support reconfiguration and adaptability. The most promising paradigms for the implementation of such systems are multi-agents and service oriented architectures (SOA), mainly over the DPWS (Device Profile for Web Services) implementation which was aimed at devices. An important limitation of most current multi-agent systems is that the management system is not totally distributed. Failure in the agent responsible for the registry can overthrow the entire system. DPWS does not have this limitation, since the management system is totally distributed. However, DPWS does not support agent autonomy notions as efficiently. The possibility of creating a truly distributed multi-agent system by linking both approaches led to this thesis. A Middleware layer was developed that enables agents to benefit from DPWS functionalities in order to reach the proposed goal. This middleware layer joins agents, databases, hardware, simulators, human interface applications such as production system management, error correction and maintenance, etc. To prove this concept a 3D model of an agent controlled manufacturing system with transporters augmented with DPWS communication interfaces was developed