DISTRIBUTED VIRTUAL MANUFACTURING FOR DEVELOPMENT OF MODULAR MACHINE SYSTEMS

To support all phases of an agile modular manufacturing machine life cycle with CAE and Virtual Manufacturing tools, a number of different engineering applications (e.g. specialist software based tools) are typically used for design, simulation, analysis, programming, control and monitoring of a machine. These applications mainly exist today as small applications islands where each of them manages their own data. When a manufacturing machine is designed, simulated, programmed, analyzed, tested, or operated, the information, connected to that specific machine, used and generated by each application island is stored separately by each application. These application islands often use different storage technologies. Each one of the applications has an information structure to separate the information connected to each machine; however, they do not necessarily use the same information structure. Another issue concerning these applications is the functionality that is implemented in them to manage information; ...