Manufacturing systems are developed and configured using different design tools, e.g. CAD for mechanical construction, CAEfor electronic engineering and IDEfor software development. These tools work on different views of automation units, which are the basic blocks of manufacturing systems. With this, tool dependent data is generated that relates to automation units involved in the manufacturing process. These tool dependent data sets can be seen as data objects, which are disjunctive in terms of information content.This paper presents a framework, which allows the integration ofdifferent design tools. Theframework is based on concept of holistic mechatronic objects (HMO), where automation units and related tool dependent data sets are seen as mechatronic objects and related data objects. The framework allows 3D simulation of manufacturing systems on high performance PC clusters using the VRML export of CAD tools. The virtual reality modelling environment interacts with a simulation of the control environment. Since 3D-information is provided and available via the framework, software for automation units can be implemented and tested in parallel to the hardware development, reducing development time.

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