A study on the efficient management of digital virtual factory objects using a classification and coding system

Today, manufacturing industries undergo constantly growing pressures for global competition. These industries, responding to varied customers' requirements, must shorten product life cycles. To shorten product cycles, industries must strongly reduce product development time. To acquire competitive power, they must save on costs. Digital virtual manufacturing is a technology that can facilitate effective product development and agile production by using digital models representing the physical and logical schema and the behavior of real manufacturing systems including products, processes, manufacturing resources, and plants. A digital virtual factory as a well-designed and integrated environment is essential for successful applications of this technology. By applying digital engineering technologies and a digital virtual factory, engineers and process planners could make decisions in the spirit of collaborative engineering. As a result, they could dramatically reduce the manufacturing preparation time and development costs for new products. In our work described in this paper, we classified factory objects attributes by using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We developed a new classification and coding system for digital factory objects based on these factory objects. We developed an application case to verify this system for effectiveness in an assembly shop in an auto company. In addition, a digital virtual factory layout construction system based on the classification and coding system was developed using Visual Basic.NET, XML, and an AutoCAD Object module. It is possible to reuse and to manage a factory's object model data through the system. As a consequence, an engineer can construct a new digital virtual factory model more easily. In the past this task has been recognized as being a very painful and time-consuming job.