A Virtual Factory Tool to enhance the Integrated Design of Production Lines

Virtual manufacturing concepts have been adopted by most of the industrial companies, including the small and medium ones, to face the global competition and deal with the top challenges of manufacturing industry, i.e. improving the quality, reducing the delivery time and decreasing the costs. However, most of the virtual manufacturing methodologies, tools and software systems are not integrated well enough to perform the required activities in an efficient manner The attention is usually focused on local and specific proficiency, thus jeopardizing the sharing of information between the departments, the parallelization of work and the communication along the product or factory life-cycle. Indeed, the transmission of data and results is usually difficult and carried out by means of expensive and/or time-consuming manual work. This paper presents a software tool, named Design Synthesis Module (DSM), to face some of the afore mentioned problems by adopting the approach proposed by the Virtual Factory Framework project, consisting in a holistic virtual environment that integrates several decoupled functional tools sharing the same data model to support the design and management of factories. The proposed solution represents one of the tools integrated in VFF and aims at improving the proposal and design phases of production lines in terms of quality, time and cost by supporting the management of production system configuration data across several departments. DSM support the bidding and system design activities by enabling a quick evaluation of system configurations, easy adjustments and reuse of data, and the concurrent design and integrations with other tools.