Virtual factory manager of semantic data

The current challenges in manufacturing engineering are the integration of the product/process/factory worlds (data and tools) and the synchronization of their lifecycles. Major ICT players already offer all-comprehensive Product Lifecycle Management suites supporting most of the processes. However, they do not offer all the required functionalities and they lack of interoperability. An answer will be given by the development of a Virtual Factory Framework (VFF): an integrated virtual environment that supports factory processes along all the phases of its lifecycle. This paper will focus on the Virtual Factory Manager (VFM) that acts as a server supporting the I/O communications within the framework for the software tools needing to access its data repository. The VFM will ensure data consistency and avoid data loss or corruption while different modules access/modify partial areas of the data repository at different times. Finally, an industrial case study will show the potentiality of the VFM.

International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing (ijidem), 2010

In order to tackle a continuous improvement of virtual engineering, product modelling has to integrate more knowledge that refers to every decision taken during the product development process. Those decisions have to be related to the assessment of the whole product life cycle. This paper particularly addresses the domain of product’s industrialisation that aims at selecting the manufacturing processes. This

The global market with increasing competition calls for new strategies that strengthen the future manufacturing systems. This paper presents the underlying models and ideas enabling a new conceptual framework for the next generation of Virtual Factory implementations. The approach fosters four pillars: a standard extensible data model; decoupled functional modules, based on an object oriented Virtual Factory paradigm; an event driven paradigm at the core of abstract objects management; the integration of knowledge at different layers for the decoupled functional modules. The implementation of a Virtual Factory based on the presented framework, points to the usefulness when developing future manufacturing systems.

International Journal of Internet Manufacturing and Services, 2013

As manufacturing systems are often costly to develop and operate, simulation technology has been demonstrated to be an effective tool for improving manufacturing system design and the efficiency of manufacturing operations and maintenance. However, effectively and efficiently using simulation remains an important issue in the manufacturing industry. One of the principal reasons is the difficulty in processing, organising, and making use of the production-related information about the manufacturing system to be simulated. The difficulty stemmed from no standard representation for such data, making the effort to input data such as product attributes, processing times, and material quantity requirements into simulations complex, time consuming, and error prone. The core manufacturing simulation data (CMSD) standards, SISO-STD-008-2010 and SISO-STD-008-01-2012, specifically address this data representation issue. CMSD enables the import/export of many different types of factory data into computer simulations and other manufacturing systems. This paper describes the motivation for creating CMSD, standardisation efforts for CMSD, and related research efforts. This paper also describes how CMSD could be used as an integration mechanism in a sustainable manufacturing test-bed being developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The test-bed will be a virtual manufacturing environment to support the testing and validation of sustainability metrics, assessment methods, and tools for use in manufacturing.

International Journal of Mechatronics and Manufacturing Systems, 2020

Interoperability is a key factor in implementing a future factory. In European Union context interoperability is the ability of organisations to interact towards mutually beneficial goals, involving the sharing of information and knowledge between these organisations, through the business processes they support, by means of the exchange of data between their Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems. Interoperability of future factory synthesizes software components, application solutions, business processes and business context throughout the diversified, heterogeneous, autonomous procedure, assembled from multiple independent factories or smart/digital factory networks. As a part of research results of EU H2020 "vF Interoperation L. Xu et al. suppoRting buSiness innovaTion" (FIRST) project, we present a comprehensive review on basic concepts of factories of the future. The relationships among smart factory, digital factory and virtual factory are studied. In this paper, we define future factory interoperability and outline the research challenges related to interoperability.

Standardisation initiatives (ISO and IEC) try to answer the problem of managing heterogeneous information, scattered within organizations, by formalising the knowledge related to products technical data. While the product is the centred object from which, along its life cycle, all enterprise systems, either inside a single enterprise or between cooperating networked enterprises, have a specific view, we may consider it as active as far as it participates to the decisions making by providing knowledge about itself. This paper proposes a novel approach, postulating that the product, represented by its technical data, may be considered as interoperable per se with the many applications involved in manufacturing enterprises as far as it embeds knowledge about itself, as it stores all its technical data, provided that these are embedded on a common model. The matter of this approach is to formalise of all technical data and concepts contributing to the definition of a Product Ontology, e...

Annual Reviews in Control, 2009

Proceedings of CAPE'97 - IFIP Int Conf on Computer Applications in Production and Engineering, Detroit, Nov. 97 (Chapman & Hall)

The materialization of the paradigm of virtual enterprise, although enabled by recent developments in communication technologies and computer networks, requires the definition of a reference architecture and the design and development of a supporting platform and appropriate protocols and mechanisms. This paper describes the approach being developed by the European Esprit project PRODNET, which aims at designing and developing an open platform to support industrial virtual enterprises with special focus on the needs of small and medium enterprises.

1999

Manufacturing enterprises are being forced into greater collaboration with customers and suppliers in order to produce quality products in smaller batches, shorter lead times and with greater variety. Consequently, the design-for-manufacturing task must be conducted in these virtual and distributed enterprises across traditional organizational boundaries. This paper proposes the use of standard information models to support the product realization process. While extensive work has been performed in developing product data models little eort has been performed in developing a manufacturing model. The design-for-manufacturing stages are identi®ed with their requisite information requirements. Dierent approaches used to model various aspects of manufacturing processes are reviewed and found inadequate for supporting the entire design-for-manufacturing task. The development of a standard manufacturing systems information model written in EXPRESS and based upon the modelling methodology adhered to by standard for the exchange of product (STEP) is proposed to ®ll the void. Initial developments in this area are discussed, the model is illustrated with an example, and the potential bene®ts to manufacturing are reviewed.

Procedia CIRP, 2013

Competitive manufacturing companies have to effectively deal with the concurrent evolution of products, processes and production systems. This problem, known as Co-evolution, can be addressed only through the integrated use of different methodologies, provided that the digital tools implementing these methodologies can interoperate properly and effectively. This paper presents the concept of an integrated framework to support the interoperability between digital factory tools and shows how it can benefit the business processes along the whole factory life-cycle.