4,445 research outputs found
Innovative configurable and collaborative approach to automation systems engineering for automotive powertrain assembly
Presently the automotive industry is facing enormous pressure due to global
competition and ever changing legislative, economic and customer demands. Both,
agility and reconfiguration are widely recognised as important attributes for
manufacturing systems to satisfy the needs of competitive global markets. To facilitate
and accommodate unforeseen business changes within the automotive industry, a new
proactive methodology is urgently required for the design, build, assembly and
reconfiguration of automation systems. There is also need for the promotion of new
technologies and engineering methods to enable true engineering concurrency between
product and process development. Virtual construction and testing of new automation
systems prior to build is now identified as a crucial requirement to enable system
verification and to allow the investigation of design alternatives prior to building and
testing physical systems. The main focus of this research was to design and develop
reconfigurable assembly systems within the powertrain sector of the automotive
industry by capturing and modelling relevant business and engineering processes.
This research has proposed and developed a more process-efficient and robust
automation system design, build and implementation approach via new engineering
services and a standard library of reusable mechanisms. Existing research at
Loughborough had created the basic technology for a component based approach to
automation. However, no research had been previously undertaken on the application of
this approach in a user engineering and business context. The objective of this research
was therefore to utilise this prototype method and associated engineering tools and to
devise novel business and engineering processes to enable the component-based
approach to be applied in industry. This new approach has been named Configurable
and Collaborative Automation Systems (CO AS). In particular this new research has
studied the implications of migration to a COAS approach in terms of I) necessary
changes to the end-users business processes, 2) potential to improve the robustness of
the resultant system and 3) potential for improved efficiency and greater collaboration
across the supply chain... cont'
Virtue integrated platform : holistic support for distributed ship hydrodynamic design
Ship hydrodynamic design today is often still done in a sequential approach. Tools used for the different aspects of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulation (e.g. wave resistance, cavitation, seakeeping, and manoeuvring), and even for the different levels of detail within a single aspect, are often poorly integrated. VIRTUE (the VIRtual Tank Utility in Europe) project has the objective to develop a platform that will enable various distributed CFD and design applications to be integrated so that they may operate in a unified and holistic manner. This paper presents an overview of the VIRTUE Integrated Platform (VIP), e.g. research background, objectives, current work, user requirements, system architecture, its implementation, evaluation, and current development and future work
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