Reality-infused simulations for dashboarding potential realities

Roy Damgrave, Maaike Slot, Sebastian Thiede, Eric Lutters
2021 Procedia CIRP  
In today's business environment, the trend towards more product variety and customization is unbroken. Due to this development, the need of agile and reconfigurable production systems emerged to cope with various products and product families. To design and optimize production systems as well as to choose the optimal product matches, product analysis methods are needed. Indeed, most of the known methods aim to analyze a product or one product family on the physical level. Different product
more » ... ies, however, may differ largely in terms of the number and nature of components. This fact impedes an efficient comparison and choice of appropriate product family combinations for the production system. A new methodology is proposed to analyze existing products in view of their functional and physical architecture. The aim is to cluster these products in new assembly oriented product families for the optimization of existing assembly lines and the creation of future reconfigurable assembly systems. Based on Datum Flow Chain, the physical structure of the products is analyzed. Functional subassemblies are identified, and a functional analysis is performed. Moreover, a hybrid functional and physical architecture graph (HyFPAG) is the output which depicts the similarity between product families by providing design support to both, production system planners and product designers. An illustrative example of a nail-clipper is used to explain the proposed methodology. An industrial case study on two product families of steering columns of thyssenkrupp Presta France is then carried out to give a first industrial evaluation of the proposed approach. Abstract In production environments, it is essential to anticipate the opportunities and challenges of new technology implementation trajectories. Often, companies face an inability to oversee the consequences on different aggregation levels, fields of expertise, perspectives and time-frames. This research presents an architecture to support simulation-based prevision of potential realities that comprehend results in a meaningful and perspective-dependent manner. The architecture specifically aims to ensure that the simulation benefits surpass the efforts and cost involved. The instant-controlled flexibility of reality-infused simulations leads to more insight in the effects of changes, while structuring the development trajectory and making it more predictable and deterministic. Abstract In production environments, it is essential to anticipate the opportunities and challenges of new technology implementation trajectories. Often, companies face an inability to oversee the consequences on different aggregation levels, fields of expertise, perspectives and time-frames. This research presents an architecture to support simulation-based prevision of potential realities that comprehend results in a meaningful and perspective-dependent manner. The architecture specifically aims to ensure that the simulation benefits surpass the efforts and cost involved. The instant-controlled flexibility of reality-infused simulations leads to more insight in the effects of changes, while structuring the development trajectory and making it more predictable and deterministic.
doi:10.1016/j.procir.2021.05.027 fatcat:ze3bitentndwhljjlhzammu3su