Driving Digital Manufacturing to Reality

The goal of digital manufacturing is to provide the manufacturing community with solutions to create, validate, monitor and control agile, distributed manufacturing production systems geared towards build-to-order and lean production. The scope of Digital Manufacturing has evolved recently to include Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP); Computer Aided Production Engineering (CAPE); a Manufacturing Data Base which contains product data, process data, manufacturing resources (PPR); generation of executable programs for automation; the generation of work instructions for workers on the shop floor and the feedback of manufacturing performance data from the shop floor. Digital Manufacturing is a 3D computer environment that has only become possible because the product data and tooling data are now available in 3D CAD. This paper discusses the methodology of applying Digital Manufacturing from the initial concept design phase of both product and production processes, through detail design and validation, to both implementation on the shop floor and the constant monitoring the shop floor performance data to support continuous improvement activities. Because up to 60 percent of the value of automobiles and fighter aircraft are sourced from suppliers, the Digital Manufacturing environment must be accessible across the supply chain to support today’s B2B method of doing business. 1 FROM PROCESS ENGINEERING TO PRODUCTION The more experienced users realize the value of utilizing Digital Manufacturing from the very earliest phases of the product realization process. The value continues after product launch as the feed back of performance data and maintenance history is used to constantly improve the processes. Digital Manufacturing is broken up into ten methodologies: 1. Define all constraints and objectives of the production system. 224 2. Define the best process to build the product and its variants according to targeted constraints and objectives. 3. Define and refine the production system process resources and architecture, and measure its anticipated performance. 4. Define, simulate and optimize the production flow. 5. Define and refine the plant layout. 6. Develop and validate the control and monitor functions of the production system. Execute the schedule. 7. Balance the line, calculate costs and efficiencies of the complete production system and select the appropriate solution. 8. Download valid simulation results to generate executable shop-floor instructions. 9. Upload, accumulate and analyze performance data from actual production system operations to continuously optimize the production process 10. Support field operations with maintenance instructions and monitor maintenance history. Following these methodologies, the entire enterprise has maintained complete control of the process planning, the PPR validation and the deployment to the shop floor and the field. The day-to-day process planning is conducted within the same environment to accommodate for late part delivery, machine breakdown, absenteeism, etc. By continuous monitoring of the shop and field, unforeseen problems can be addressed quickly and the performance data can be used in modeling future evolutions of new products using the same manufacturing processes. By keeping a current model of the PPR status on the shop floor, new products and processes can be quickly evaluated. 2 A DECISION SUPPORT TOOL It is clear that Digital Manufacturing is a decision support tool. It provides the members of the concurrent engineering team, or Integrated Product Team (IPT), the environ-