Sung-Ho Nam

An Integrated Shop Operation System for Multi-Cell Flexible Manufacturing Systems under Job Shop Environments

Recent trends in the flexible manufacturing systems are morphing cell control for the shop-wide production operation system and providing the integrated operation and execution system together with vendor-specific FMC/FMS platform. In these requirements, the shop-floor level operation system plays a role of coordinating the control activity of each cell, and has to provide flexibility for the complexity of mixed operations of various cells. This paper suggests a system architecture for the mixed environments of multi-cells and job shop, its corresponding enabling technologies based on comparative studies with other related studies and commercialized systems. This approach includes a process definition model considering the integration with upper BOM-BOP and external service modules, and reconfigurable device-level interface which provides dynamic interconnections with machine tools and cell controllers. The function modules and their implementation results are also described to provide the feasibility of the proposed approaches as the flexible shop-floor operation system for the multi-cell environments.

An On-line System Architecture for Remote Energy Monitoring of CNC Machine Tools

Enhancing energy efficiency of machine tools causes substantial impacts on the manufacturing industries, to cope with the competitive introduction of the total energy management strategies. Real-time energy monitoring is essential to identify energy consumption patterns of the machine tools and correlate them with the energy management strategy. Integrated analysis of machine tool`s operation status and the corresponding energy usage is most important to accurately evaluate the energy efficiency under the various machining process environments. This paper proposes a system architecture to realize the online energy monitoring system and the embedded energy monitoring approach interconnected with the CNC kernel. The shop-floor operation management system is presented to integrate the proposed online energy monitoring approach.

Function and service pattern analysis for reconfiguring collaboration systems

Recently, manufacturing companies tried to increase competitiveness in their business collaboration with cooperative companies rather than within their own company. In Korea, more than 600 manufacturing companies are using web-based collaboration systems developed by the government-led project, referred to as i-Manufacturing. The project is being conducted to facilitate on-line collaboration among manufacturing companies since 2004. There are lots of functions and services supported by each collaboration system. In order to re-apply a developed system to other companies, however, we have to modify, upgrade, or newly develop some parts of the system, which is called as customization. During customization processes, we reconfigure functions or services of the system to satisfy user requirements. To facilitate reconfiguration of collaboration systems, therefore, we first define user patterns. Then we introduce an analysis technique to investigate and analyze patterns by using data mining. The analysis technique verifies normal or abnormal patterns(e.g., drastic increase in using a specific function or service), and automatically make the system recognize an abnormal pattern as a new normal pattern when the abnormal pattern continue for a long time. Including the analysis technique, we also suggest a reconfiguration guideline for reorganizing function modules into services in a specific collaboration system.

Methodology of Topic Maps creation and Semantic Web for technological information search regarding injection-mold based on Collaboration Hub

Topic Maps provide a fairly simple but very powerful meta-model for the representation of knowledge models. As a technology for implementation of semantic Web, topic maps characteristics are integration of distributed data and supporting of semantic based searching in order to find accurate information. For the feature of topic maps, we have to design ontology and deploy data properly in order to configure knowledge from information resource which exists inside specific domain. This paper describes a proposed methodology for creating Topic Maps. The methodology is designed for the development of an initial ontology for a Semantic Web, but can be adapted for other purposes. For creating topic maps using supported methodology, it described injection mold technology information based on ontology which is on the engineering collaboration hub. Tools for creating topic maps are introduced and it described converting data from injection mold technology information to Topic Map. Knowledge library on engineering collaboration hub of KITECH represented the example of Semantic Web for knowledge search of injection-mold technology information.

Architecture of Flexible and Reliable Control & Monitoring System for Distributed Machining Systems

Abstract: Recent control and monitoring system (CMS) can access diverse information of multi-vendor systems through open-system features of the latest CNCs, and plays decisive roles of interactive manufacturing information exchanges between the higher-level production systems and the field-level control equipments. This paper deals with a flexible and reliable architecture of CMS, aiming at the real-time networked control and monitoring in the distributed production environments. The developed CMS has a component-based network framework to flexibly access and integrate the individual information of various control equipments including CNCs, and dynamic mapping function to provide flexible communications between the field level to the business level. It has been investigated that the XML data exchange facility on the developed network framework can provide reliable and flexible connectivity between higher-level production systems and control equipments in shop-floor systems.