Development of a virtual simulator for agile manufacturing system

To cope with the reduction of product life-cycle and increasing variety of products and demands, a virtual simulator is developed to make the changeover of manufacturing line efficient. It can design a layout of a factory and make the time scheduling. We suggest a scheme that heightens the agility to the diversity of manufacturing models by making the information of manufacturing lines and products models to be shared The developed unit simulator can construct a proper virtual manufacturing line along with the required process of products using several kinds of operator and work cell. A user can utilize an interface that makes one to manage the separate task process for each manufacturing module, change operator components and work cells, and easily teach tasks of each task module. The developed simulator was made for user convenience by Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 that can develop a program supplying graphic user interface environment and by OpenGL of the Silicon Graphics as a graphic library to embody 3D graphic environment. Also, we show that the simulator can be used efficiently by the communication among factories linked by TCP/IP and a hybrid database system made by a hierarchical model and a relational model being developed to standardize the data.