An integrated design, simulation and programming environment for modular manufacturing machine systems

Agility has been identified as one of the most important attributes for manufacturing machine systems to satisfy the needs of the global competitive markets. By agility, it means that manufacturing machine systems can respond to changes in products and processes within the shortest time and at the minimum cost. To accomplish such a requirement, any tools that assist to capture requirements and ease the transition to implementation of the manufacturing machine systems must be explored. Based on the component/image-based paradigm, this research study proposes a highly integrated design, simulation and programming environment that can be applied to realise agility in manufacturing machine systems. It facilitates the design, programming, testing and verification of the manufacturing machine systems to be made first in the virtual (simulation) environment and then seamlessly transferred to the distributed control system environment for controlling real machines/devices. lEC 61131 Part 3, as the widely accepted international programming standard, is identified as the most suitable neutral modelling and programming languages for describing the control logic of the machine systems exchanged between the virtual and real control environment. This research work focuses on exploring the concepts and implementation techniques for integrating simulation to the process of developing component-based distributed control and runtime support systems for modular manufacturing machine systems. It also introduces a new virtual engineering methodology for the development lifecycle of modular manufacturing machine systems; from conceptual design, specification, and implementation phases to final commissioning that can be readily accepted by machine builders and/or system integrators. In contrast with other similar efforts, this work proposes and implements a hybrid method of control logic verification and control logic transfer that can incorporate both discrete-event simulation and continuous simulation based on the novel concepts of virtual I/O, virtual function blocks and corresponding interfacing techniques. It therefore offers a general solution of off-line programming for customisable modular automation equipment that is built from modular machine components supplied by multiple vendors operated on heterogeneous platforms. The integrated toolset and methodology proposed has been successfully applied to and evaluated against an industrial-scale engine cylinder-head assembly cell. The performance of the underlying communication infrastructure ha.s also been evaluated quantitatively. Extending the concept of virtual function blocks to incorporate the emerging function block standard, lEC 61499, is outlined as one of the next phases of research.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Ng, Hok Chuen

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/f12c02f5-544d-4b06-8733-6abfa9f62728/download