Daniel A. Vera

Innovative virtual prototyping environment for reconfigurable manufacturing system engineering

Abstract A new approach to the design and implementation of virtual prototyping environments (VPEs), aimed at providing support for the engineering of flexible machine technologies (referred to as reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs)) is presented. The research is focused on two aspects of VPE tool development, namely on ensuring the consistency between real- and virtual-system architectures, design tools, and design processes and on maximizing the potential of three-dimensional computer-based virtual models as a basis for distributed engineering collaboration. A component-based (CB) approach to VPE tool design and implementation is proposed, which radically contrasts with approaches commonly adopted by both the commercial and academic VPE developers. The VPE developed in the context of this research should ultimately enable more effective management of RMS complex engineering life cycles by engineering partners who are globally distributed.

An approach for knowledge-driven product, process and resource mappings for assembly automation

The rapid development and reconfiguration of assembly automation systems to accommodate product changes in a short period of time is a challenging task due to the limitations of the contemporary automation systems engineering approach. To improve the engineering process, Product Process Resource (PPR)-based modeling, simulation and data integration systems emerged as a promising approach to compress the development time and engineering cost by enabling collaboration and realization of product and manufacturing resources in a virtual environment. However, due to ineffective coupling of PPR data, design and reconfiguration of assembly systems is still a challenging task and is highly dependent on the knowledge and experience of engineers. This paper presents a knowledge-driven engineering approach to manage the mapping of engineering data sets to interconnect product attributes to manufacturing process and resources. A case study based on a Festo test rig is presented for illustrating the implementation of the approach. The successful identification of the tasks required to manufacture a product proves the approach concept but only for the presented use case.

Engineering the Smart Factory

The fourth industrial revolution promises to create what has been called the smart factory. The vision is that within such modular structured smart factories, cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralised decisions. This paper provides a view of this initiative from an automation systems perspective. In this context it considers how future automation systems might be effectively configured and supported through their lifecycles and how integration, application modelling, visualisation and reuse of such systems might be best achieved. The paper briefly describes limitations in current engineering methods, and new emerging approaches including the cyber physical systems (CPS) engineering tools being developed by the automation systems group (ASG) at Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, UK.

A knowledge-based solution for automatic mapping in component based automation systems

Due to the current business requirements, the manufacturing industry is striving to reduce design, development and commissioning time of production systems to manufacture new products in a timely manner. The use of new technologies such as virtual engineering, automatic code generation and knowledge-based approaches is being extensively researched. This paper presents a framework that utilizes a knowledge-based approach to automate the component mapping in the code generation process. The raw data is taken from simulation models of manufacturing systems developed in 3D based virtual engineering tools. Moreover, a prototype implementation is presented and the results are discussed.

Product, process and resource model coupling for knowledge-driven assembly automation

Abstract Accommodating frequent product changes in a short period of time is a challenging task due to limitations of the contemporary engineering approach to design, build and reconfigure automation systems. In particular, the growing quantity and diversity of manufacturing information, and the increasing need to exchange and reuse this information in an efficient way has become a bottleneck. To improve the engineering process, digital manufacturing and Product, Process and Resource (PPR) modelling are considered very promising to compress development time and engineering cost by enabling efficient design and reconfiguration of manufacturing resources. However, due to ineffective coupling of PPR data, design and reconfiguration of assembly systems are still challenging tasks due to the dependency on the knowledge and experience of engineers. This paper presents an approach for data models integration that can be employed for coupling the PPR domain models for matching the requirements of products for assembly automation. The approach presented in this paper can be used effectively to link data models from various engineering domains and engineering tools. For proof of concept, an example implementation of the approach for modelling and integration of PPR for a Festo test rig is presented as a case study.

Evaluating a new flexible soldering system for electronics small and medium enterprises

A new flexible soldering system for small to medium European electronics manufacturers is proposed by a group of European industrialists and academics as part of an EC-funded research project. The proposed soldering facility is intended to assist electronics small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in tackling the ever growing market need for lower volume and higher variety of soldering printed circuit boards. A business evaluation study was carried out as part of this project to understand and highlight the impact of change in soldering methods within the project collaborators’ businesses. The development of the proposed soldering system is discussed briefly in the current paper and the adopted evaluation approach using business process modelling and process simulation is explained.

Plant descriptions for engineering tool interoperability

The emergence and deployment of connected devices in many domains of application (e.g. industrial production, buildings and facilities, urban environment, etc.) have resulted in the need to achieve integration of multiple and more complex systems. This new environment is stressing the intrinsic limits imposed by monolithic standards, data models and integration methods that focus on specific domains of application, types of systems, or specific aspects of a system. This paper describes the Plant Description Service developed as part of the Arrowhead Interoperability framework (EU ECSEL funded project). The manuscript contains a description of the abstract system descriptive model based on which the Plant Description service was implemented, and describes how the service can be used to achieve integration of several industry standards and data models. One use case and one case study is provided that illustrates how the service was practically implemented to support engineering scenarios in the domain of industrial production. The paper concludes with a critical review of the approach and suggestion for future work and developments.

Ontology based semantic-predictive model for reconfigurable automation systems

Due to increasing product variety and complexity, capability to support reconfiguration is a key competitiveness indicator for current automation system within large enterprises. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems could efficiently reuse existing knowledge in order to decrease the required skills and design time to launch new products. However, most of the software tools developed to support design of reconfigurable manufacturing system lack integration of product, process and resource knowledge, and the design data is not transferred from domain-specific engineering tools to a collaborative and intelligent platform to capture and reuse design knowledge. The focus of this research study is to enable integrated automation systems design to support a knowledge reuse approach to predict process and resource changes when product requirements change. The proposed methodology is based on a robust semantic-predictive model supported by ontology representations and predictive algorithms for the integration of Product, Process, Resource and Requirement (PPRR) data, so that future automation system changes can be identified at early design stages.

Improving fault diagnosis and accessibility in Manufacturing automation systems using X3DOM

Today industry has to face the demands of products at lower cost and reduced time-to-market in a global market environment. Solutions require the application with new and innovative technologies to efficiently achieve the desirable functional capabilities. The benefits of Virtual Engineering environments are becoming noticeable at product and process development level but its visualisation has not been applied much at a shop-floor level. Using an automation toolset utilising a component based approach, this paper introduces a Web-based 3D fault diagnosis and its visualisation in a shop-floor that delivers better perception and understanding to engineers, and even provides convenient shop floor accessibility to machine information anytime and anywhere. In particular, this work has implemented 3D fault visualisation using an X3DOM model and technology. It improves the accessibility of 3D visualisation without the need for specific visualisation software and can be deployed on both PC-based hardware and mobile devices.

Assessing complexity of component-based control architectures used in modular automation systems

Component-based development (CBD) supports hierarchical decomposition of manufacturing control architectures through data and procedural abstraction, allowing designers to handle system development complexity better than function-oriented methods. Although the CBD approach helps managing complexity of the software design and development process, it does not reduce or eliminate complexity of control systems. In fact, large and highly coupled system architectures make entire software very difficult to understand and modify, especially during manufacturing system re-configuration and scale up/down processes. Thus, it is essential to maintain simplicity in control system design, without disregarding the required modularity and functionality. This paper proposes an information-theoretic measure to quantify the complexity of component-based manufacturing control systems. The proposed measure is tested over the auto-generated control codes of Festo MPS system for its validity. The authors believe that the proposed approach can be served as a proactive design support especially useful for early design stages as it allows designers to select the optimal control architectures with least complexity and provides a clear understanding of the potential stress points.