Design of an Interactive Virtual Factory Using Cell Formation Methodologies

Abstract

This paper describes an interactive virtual environment for modeling and designing factories and shop floors. The factory building tool is developed as an open architecture in which various modules can be utilized to quickly implement factory design algorithms ranging from plant layout to factory flow analysis. Software modules and utilities have been implemented to allow easy set-up of the visual interface. In this paper, this virtual factory is used to implement cellular manufacturing (CM) system. CM has traditionally been a very complicated system to implement in practice. However successful implementation of the system has improved productivity immersely. Several issues involved in implementing CM within our virtual factory machine modeling and interface designs for defining the cells, are discussed. The mathematical clustering algorithm called Modified Boolean Method was implemented to automatically generate complex virtual environments. The virtual factory makes the process of CM-based factory design a very easy and intuitive process. Though the cell formation problem is NP-complete in 2D space, issues related to human factors and ergonomics can be better perceived in a 3D virtual environment. It also leads to further optimization with respect to maintainability and performance, and thus help get better solutions, which are not visible unless the factory is built. Our virtual factory interface also allows easy reassignment of machines and parts, subcontracting of bottleneck parts and rearranging of machines within the same design environment, making this a productive industrial tool. 3D virtual factory can also be automatically generated from the Part Machine interface called the Virtual Matrix Interface.

Manufacturing system design with virtual factory tools

“…• factory-level prototyping • virtual assembly environments • virtual prototyping of lower-level activities At the factory level, VR is used in most applications to support modification and simulation of existing shop floors or to improve the design of new layouts (Kesavadas and Ernzer 1999). A well-designed layout is mandatory to prevent idle time and bottlenecks.…”

Coupling of interactive manufacturing operations simulation and immersive virtual reality

“…One of the few research projects aimed at the investigation of the benefits of a VE in the context of operations simulation was undertaken by Kesavadas and Ernzer [11] at the University of Buffalo. They have developed the VR-Fact program -a virtual environment for modeling and designing factories and shop floors.…”

An Interactive Layout and Simulation System of Virtual Factory

“…Specific investigations were deployed on virtual layout and simulation, but here we mention just a few relevant papers on virtual interactive design and event communication in virtual factory. Kesavadas and Ernzer [5] developed an interactive system to design workshop arrangements for a given product and set of machines. Specific algorithms combined with a novel concept to visually represent the mathematical solution and automatically provide information from a database were implemented in a virtual environment.…”