Navid Shariatzadeh

An Approach for Manufacturing Process Representation in Product Lifecycle Management

Current PLM systems have concentrated on product design, not on manufacturing engineering with its development of e.g. Material flows and layouts. This paper proposes an approach to describe how to represent the main required manufacturing process data using ontologies together with generic data standards. This approach makes it possible to develop translations between different software, and also providing users with the meaning of different concepts. It contributes to an efficient management of manufacturing information, with a focus on the material flow information as used in Discrete Event Simulation - DES.

Rapid Production Changes through the Coordination of Factory Layout Models and Activities

Changing the design of a factory in practice involves the change of a number of parallel and interdependent systems such as the machining resources and robot cells, the supply systems for electricity, water, air, heat and cooling, pneumatics and hydraulics, the systems for chip and waste handling, process fluid, communication networks, sprinkler systems, as well as the building construction. Thus the coordination of information and models, as well as of the design work activities, is of utmost importance to achieve a fast and flexible development process. This paper presents the results from a research project focusing on computer aided work processes and the communication of models between various stake holders in layout design. The primary objective was to provide methods for a coordinated factory development process with a facilitated information exchange and reuse of knowledge and models. Results concerning required layout and PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) functionalities, as well as modelling and communication principles, tested in an industrial case, are presented.

Material flow data representation and integration based on STEP

A fundamental requirement for executing Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is incorporating a data structure that represents process, product and resource information, their interrelations. Further, the capability of integrating this data structure with other types of information such as geometry, e.g. for sizes of products or distances of transports, is of vital interest. Manufacturing information is normally not integrated but is heterogeneous and stored in different Computer Aided Design (CAD), and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) applications in the factory plant. Therefore it is important to create an information sharing repository that is based on a standardized and system neutral format to enable interoperability. Availability of relevant information would considerably cut the time of building the DES models, prevent mistakes in data entry and facilitate the reconfiguration analysis. This paper aims to describe how to represent the main required operational data of a manufacturing system for DES by using ISO 10303 Application Protocol 214 (STEP AP214) in order to fulfill the mentioned characteristics of data and information. Stochastic properties of manufacturing resource and corresponding processes such as measured cycle time and disturbances information are represented using application module 1274 (ISO 103031274) that defines a particular schema for probability distribution representation. A test implementation of the mentioned data including a graphical user interface has been carried out to show the feasibility of the research approach.