A Virtual Factory Teaching System in Support of Manufacturing Education

Abstract

To accommodate increasing product specialization, modern factories are increasingly becoming more flexible. Much of this flexibility is achieved by integrating the components of the manufacturing system (e.g., design, production, purchasing, etc). To be successful in this new manufacturing environment, an engineering college graduate must understand the total business process from design to production to delivery in order to develop a holistic view of manufacturing systems. Yet, traditional pedagogical tools are ill-equipped to develop this holistic view in students. In this paper, we describe a Virtual Factory Teaching System, VFTS, now under development to provide a tool to illustrate the concepts of factory management and design in a realistic setting. The focus of this paper is to present our pedagogical approach of the VFTS, the development of the prototype, and its use in a senior-level industrial engineering class.

An Overview of Object-Oriented Simulation

“…Due to the recent emergence of multinational corporations, it is anticipated there will be a greater need for sharedbased simulation environments. An example of a shared-based simulation environment is the Virtual Factory Teaching System [28], which allows students, working alone or in virtual teams, to build factories, forecast demand for products, plan production, establish release rules for new work into the factory, and set scheduling rules for workstations. Distributed heterogeneous models tend to be large.…”

A Web-based programmable logic controller laboratory for manufacturing engineering education

“…It also allows the organisations to limit the costs for continuing education both by providing in-house educational facilities that can be used with a flexible and adaptive schedule and by reducing the time spent in an educational laboratory outside of the work place [4]. Well known pedagogical guidelines assert that students learn more effectively in a relationship where there is a high-level of active interaction between the student and the instructor [5,6]. However many current distance learning technologies are passive in that the communication typically flows in one direction, which is only from the instructor to the student, and there is no feedback or delayed feedback in reverse direction [6,7].…”

“…Well known pedagogical guidelines assert that students learn more effectively in a relationship where there is a high-level of active interaction between the student and the instructor [5,6]. However many current distance learning technologies are passive in that the communication typically flows in one direction, which is only from the instructor to the student, and there is no feedback or delayed feedback in reverse direction [6,7]. Videotape-based programs and online material are typical examples for this type of distance learning.…”

An Agent-based Learning Approach for Teaching the Relationship Between Lot Size and Cycle Time

“…Readers interested in learning more about the VFTS can refer to the papers by Dessouky et al (1998Dessouky et al ( , 2001 or access it through our web page at http:// vfts.isi.edu/ (specify the group id as "guest-agent", the user id as "guest", and the password as "guest"). An example that illustrates setting up a factory within the VFTS can be found in the tutorial at http:// vfts.isi.edu/docs/vfts.htm.…”