A facility description language for distributed design integration
Abstract
A principal goal of concurrent engineering has been to reduce the development cycle and time to market for new products. The success of such efforts brings about a parallel need for rapid design, evaluation, and reconfiguration of the facilities required to manufacture these products. Traditional facility layout methods rely on a sequence of actions progressing through a series of increasingly detailed analyses. More recent techniques automate and improve this process. However, there is little progress toward an integrated environment that supports the interactions of multidisciplinary facility design teams, similar to those that have enhanced the product design process. This research introduces a generic Facility Description Language (FDL), which provides a common formal base for collaborative work and detailed analysis of process layout, flow geometry, visual aspects of control, and safety. FDL utilizes the capabilities of simulator-emulator design workstations to integrate the physical and logical aspects of manufacturing facility design. Specifically, this research defines the basic functions of FDL and a prototype implementation architecture. This language can serve as a useful structure for the definition and description of a production facility at different levels of abstraction, allowing the same basic design model to be iteratively refined throughout the development process. This research demonstrates how the combination of FDL with an interactive graphical environment provides a powerful modeling tool that permits distributed users to achieve a higher level of design synergy.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Nof, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Industrial engineering
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