Virtual Engineering Applied to the Factory Planning Process.pdf

2016

INTRODUCTION Steelmaking factories are very complex plants, covering large areas with many buildings of very different features and purposes. Since their functions are strongly interdependent from each other, their arrangement within the steelmaking factories areas results to be crucial in order to maximize factory productivity. Moreover, also the machineries and equipment, present within the plants, are extremely complex, interdependent from each other and requiring special needs to achieve their best performances (Fig. 1). Taking into account these considerations, it results glaring the importance of the plant layout planning during both the design of a new factory or the refurbishing of an old steelshop. Moreover, typical electric arc furnaces have a load capacity of 80-100 tons per hour and blast furnaces process even higher material volumes. Taking these considerations into account, the material flow within a steelmaking plant can be calculated as thousands tons per day. Due to...

This paper discusses the potential of virtual reality for the manufacturing industry and on-going research in the School of Mechanical & Production Engineering of the Nanyang Technological University. A Virtual Design and a Virtual Manufacturing workbench are presented. The Virtual Design Workbench facilitates collaborative product realisation among designers, suppliers, manufacturers and customers. All the stakeholders can see a product evolve from concept to prototype. Soft computing, when incorporated in the virtual design workbench, can render it more intelligent and responsive.

2020

The design and operation of intelligent production and logistics systems requires the strong support of digital technologies today. A production and logistics system is normally modelled in a virtual environment, allowing rapid work with an extensive data set and "what - if" analyses to help optimize the resulting system design for performance, productivity, safety and environmental performance of its future operation. This paper deals with the issue of the digital design of production systems with the effective deployment of virtual reality technologies into the individual phases of the production system design. This article describes the basic steps of the digital design methodology with the description of virtual reality application tools for the production and logistics system design, in order to reduce design defects and increase work safety. The proposed methodology has been verified in an experimental workplace, presenting real outputs. The final part of the article...

Procedia CIRP, 2014

Comparing the evolvement of the manufacturing industry of the last century to the way virtual reality is used nowadays some remarkable similarities come to light. Current virtual reality equipment requires a high level of craftsmanship to achieve the maximum results, and often equipment is specially build for a dedicated process or project. While the technical revolution in the manufacturing industry led to a turnaround in which more generic production equipment were used in a structured configuration. The goal is to prevent the pitfalls already encountered in the last century in process planning, and convert the advantages of a reconfigurable manufacturing system to the way virtual reality is used.

2011

During the analysis and design of manufacturing systems, enterprises are challenged by existing restrictions and the running production. To deal with these key issues, different virtual factory approaches and tools have been widely implemented in recent years. By mean of such approaches and tools, a manufacturing system can be adapted effectively as changes occur. Virtual Reality (VR), one of the most important approaches, is now applied in scientific and industrial fields. Current studies of VR applications are mainly focusing on the design of products but not manufacturing systems. This paper presents VR as an innovative and collaborative design platform for manufacturing systems, which enables a holistic use of virtual factory tools. Based on this platform, three applications have been implemented, which are addressed at different levels of a manufacturing system. Furthermore, a noise simulation and a virtual machining tool have been visualized in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE).

This study presents a modular-based implementation of augmented reality to provide an immersive experience in learning or teaching the planning phase, control system, and machining parameters of a fully automated work cell. The architecture of the system consists of three code modules that can operate independently or combined to create a complete system that is able to guide engineers from the layout planning phase to the prototyping of the final product. The layout planning module determines the best possible arrangement in a layout for the placement of various machines, in this case a conveyor belt for transportation, a robot arm for pick-and-place operations, and a computer numerical control milling machine to generate the final prototype. The robotic arm module simulates the pick-and-place operation offline from the conveyor belt to a computer numerical control (CNC) machine utilising collision detection and inverse kinematics. Finally, the CNC module performs virtual machining based on the Uniform Space Decomposition method and axis aligned bounding box collision detection. The conducted case study revealed that given the situation, a semicircle shaped arrangement is desirable, whereas the pick-and-place system and the final generated G-code produced the highest deviation of 3.83 mm and 5.8 mm respectively. An effective simulation is one that is able to place a user in a situation which is close, if not completely identical to the scenario of which the system is attempting to simulate. The correct term for providing a user with a sense of presence, or "being there", is immersive, where in the world of virtual interaction, is defined as a complex technology that replaces real-world sensory information with synthetic stimuli such as 3D visual imagery, spatialised sound, and force or tactile feedback 1. In manufacturing, the advent of computer numerical control (CNC) machining creates a form of ubiquitous computing, and provides an effective simulation as it becomes a necessity. CNC simulations have been developed in virtual environments for numerically controlled (NC) tool path verification and machining process optimisation 2. However, limitations still exist even though virtual reality (VR)-based systems have already been applied broadly in the manufacturing industry. Firstly, the system is usually costly, requires powerful hardware, and separates the simulation aspect from the machining aspect, meaning the user has to adjust the experience gathered from the 3D graphic environment to the real machining environment 3. Secondly, the system is so tightly integrated that it is difficult to support continuous improvement and lessens flexibility, considering that a fully autonomous CNC manufacturing environment from start to finish involves many steps, not just the machining aspect 4. For example, how does one determine the placement of machines to accommodate the CNC machining aspect, and how does one place the stock material onto the worktable in an autonomous system? This brings forward the demand for a new technology, dubbed augmented reality (AR). AR is a rapidly growing field of research that aims to fully integrate virtual with real environment. AR has been developed since the early 90s, but has only recently been emerging as one of the forefront of technology, mainly due to the rise of popularity in smartphones and tablets 5. Some of the systems that have been developed for production process are related to layout planning 6-10 , product design 11-15 , assembly 16-20 , robot programming 21-26 , and autonomous

Acta Tecnología, 2020

This paper describes the use of virtual and augmented reality technologies in various fields of industrial engineering. The article provides the brief description of how augmented or virtual reality contributes to the process improvement. It is also focused on the characteristic areas and the best-known areas of industrial engineering such as goods picking, design of production and logistics systems, design of assembly workplaces and visualization of procedures and ergonomics.

Computers in Industry, 2005

Nowadays companies operate in a difficult environment: the dynamics of innovations increase and product life cycles become shorter. Furthermore products and the corresponding manufacturing processes get more and more complex. Therefore, companies need new methods for the planning of manufacturing systems. One promising approach in this context is digital factory/virtual production-the modeling and analysis of computer models of the planned factory with the objective to reduce time and costs. For the modeling and analysis various simulation methods and programs have been developed. They are a highly valuable support for planning and visualizing the manufacturing system. But there is one major disadvantage: only experienced and long trained experts are able to operate with these programs. The graphical user interface is very complex and not intuitive to use. This results in an extensive and error-prone modeling of complex simulation models and a time-consuming interpretation of the simulation results. To overcome these weak points, intuitive and understandable man-machine interfaces like augmented and virtual reality can be used. This paper describes the architecture of a system which uses the technologies of augmented and virtual reality to support the planning process of complex manufacturing systems. The proposed system assists the user in modeling, the validation of the simulation model, and the subsequent optimization of the production system. A general application of the VR-and AR-technologies and of the simulation is realized by the development of appropriate linking and integration

The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 2020

Virtual reality (VR) offers a promising set of technologies to digitally simulate industrial processes and interaction between humans and machines. However, the use of immersive VR simulations is still limited in industry due to the uncertainty of benefits in respect with traditional digital tools, and the lack of structured methodologies to effectively implement immersive virtual simulations in practice. This paper deals with the application of VR to create virtual manufacturing simulations with the aim to design assembly lines in compliance with factory ergonomics. It proposes a methodology to allow the virtualization and simulation of assembly tasks using a combination of VR tools by replicating, or rather anticipating, what would happen at the shop floor. The adopted tools are Unity 3D for virtual environment generation, HTC VIVE to immerse the user in the virtual factory layout, Xsens as tracking system, and Leap Motion for gesture recognition. The paper also compares the new VR-based procedure with a more traditional desktop-based digital simulation on industrial cases. Results show that the new methodology is more precise to detect the operator's comfort angles and more powerful to predict process criticalities and optimize factory layout design. At the same time, it is less sensitive to errors during ergonomic assessment related to the expert's subjectivity during the analysis.

The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 2021

The global trend in manufacturing has shifted from a manufacturing-centric process toward a user-centric process. This has resulted in a shorter lifespan and a high product replacement rate of any consumer product. Germany has introduced the concept of Industry Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0) to convert manufacturing processes and mechanisms into cyber-physical systems (CPS). Digital factory, being the first step into CPS and IR4.0, is being targeted as the most important evolution of the manufacturing industry. This paper defines digital factories and their differences between other similar domains such as smart factories, CPS, and virtual factories. The requirements and goals of a digital factory are explained in detail to facilitate future digital factory tool developments. Furthermore, the current challenges faced in the implementation of the digital factory are proposed to be approached by adapting an interoperable virtual reality technology. This paper emphasizes the usage of virtual ...