HIPARMS: Highly productive and reconfigurable manufacturing system

• Forschungsstelle: EU FRP
• Projektnummer: 98.0233-2
• Projekttitel Englisch: HIPARMS: Highly productive and reconfigurable manufacturing system

Schlüsselwörter (Englisch)

(Re-)configurable; modular; manufacturing systems; configuration tool

Alternative Projektnummern (Englisch)

EU project number: BRPR-CT98-9003

Forschungsprogramme (Englisch)

EU-programme: 4. Frame Research Programme - 2.1 Industrial and materials technologies

Kurzbeschreibung (Englisch)

See abstract

Partner und Internationale Organisationen (Englisch)

Coordinator: IFW University Hannover (D)

Abstract (Englisch)

The goal of this IMS project is to develop a concept for a highly productive and reconfigurable manufacturing system (HIPARMS).
New marked demands require highly flexible and highly productive manufacturing systems. Current available manufacturing concepts have difficulties to fulfil both requirements and to ensure low production costs at the same time.
The use of modern information technology, combined with a modular design on mechanical and control level, supports the configuration and reconfiguration of production environments.
For the handling of the modular machine concept new planning methods have been developed for an easy and quick customer specific configuration of transfer lines. As modular concepts certainly cause an increased system complexity such concepts often can only be handled efficiently by the application of new planning tools. The complex and costly configuration process is thus speed up and supported by knowledge-based configuration tools (called CAC-tool). This software system developed within the project uses expert knowledge to support the planning process. The CAC-system will automatically analyse user requirements from an electronic questionnaire and will determine required machining stations, as well as mechanical and control modules from the defined modular building kits. The determined configuration results will automatically be visualised in a 3D-simulation environment enabling the complete simulation of the configured manufacturing system with its full kinematic functionality. A virtual prototype of the transfer line is available at the end of the configuration process ready for detailed test and simulation purposes. For instance control modules can already be tested or the material flow and the machining operations can be simulated. The virtual transfer line can be operated with the original control system. On a more detailed simulation level even an FEM-analysis of the machine stiffness is possible.
This new generation of intelligent manufacturing system planning tools are able to reduce the planning times and costs. The use of virtual manufacturing system prototypes makes it possible to test different solutions before the cost intensive real building process will actually start.
Powersoft accomplished the following developments:
· Concept with design patterns to manage objects structured as cyclic, directed graphs with OO-paradigm (classes, objects, inheritance, polimorphism, dynamic binding).
· Design of relational database to store arbitrary classes and objects with OO paradigm.
· Implementation of an Object Broker with persistence layer.
· Implementation of graphical user interface in ActiveX controls to create, edit and rearange objects.
· Graphical user interface to search objects or attributes of objects on the database.
For cost reasons and because of its widespread use and low installation efforts, a simple relational database was evaluated to make the objects persistent. The data files can easily be transferred and shared between project partners. But this implied the development of a persistence layer that maps the object oriented data of the buisness object to the relational data on the database.
The components have been applied in the configuration tool (CAC Tool) to design, create, edit and retrieve information objects like machine data, configuration know-how, configuration sequences, configuration reports.
Because of the generic design of the database and the ObjectBroker it is possible to reuse both in other projects where arbitrary complex data objects (of the form of cyclic, directed graphs) have to be managed.
In addition the concept and components may be an alternative to the deployment of a object oriented database.

Datenbankreferenzen (Englisch)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 98.0233-2