Virtual engineering: an integrated approach to agile manufacturing machinery design and control

Development of modular manufacturing systems—a review

“…Agile manufacturing can be defined as the capability of surviving and prospering in a competitive environment of continuous and unpredictable change by reacting quickly and effectively to changing markets, driven by customerdesigned products and services [77]. Agile manufacturing is a concept that allows manufacturing systems to be built under high product customization requirements while at the same time keeping the product development time low, thus enabling such systems to produce reasonable amounts of production to maintain the advantages of economies of scale.…”

“…He and Kusiak [80] studied impact of modular product designs on the performance of a manufacturing system. Agile modular manufacturing machine system was a real system that operates the tested parameters that are designed, tested, and verified in the simulation environment [77]. Starting from an original set of different components, Dobrescu and Reich [81] suggested a method that designs a modular common platform and additional modules, shared by subsets of the designs, from which variants are composed.…”

Virtual manufacturing for press line monitoring and diagnostics

“…Previous research conducted in the ESPRIT project VIR-ENG [36,44] has proposed and successfully demonstrated the use of virtual engineering to support the entire development lifecycle of modular manufacturing machine systems, from conceptual design during negotiation and quotation stage, to the final machine commissioning phase. It has been envisaged that the graphical simulation models developed incrementally during the machine development stage can be effectively applied to the operational monitoring and maintenance phase as well.…”

Direct deployment of component-based automation systems

“…These projects commonly break down an automation system into reusable autonomous mechatronic units integrating both mechanical design and control logic. Typical examples are Business Driven Automation (BDA) based on the Component-Based approach proposed [1], Actor-Based Assembly Systems (ABAS) built based on autonomous mechatronic units [3], Modular Machine Design Environment (MMDE) [4] proposed and implemented in VIR-ENG research project and a modular approach for production system engineering by adopting mechatronic objects proposed by researchers from Daimler AG and the University of Magdeburg [5].…”