MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS-ENGINEERING AND DESIGN - AN INTELLIGENT, MULTIMODEL, INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE

Manufacturing system design is a complex process involving the integra tion of multiple systems designed by several designers each optimizing sub-systems. The life cycle of manufacturing systems design is also p roblematic because the size of the manufacturing system makes it incom prehensible by a single person, interdisciplinary in approach, asynchr onous in operation, and constantly evolving. This scope also leads to long development times with requirements that are nor well understood in the beginning and that change during the design/build cycle. Furthe r, the requirements for the designers are often conflicting and non-fu nctional. Also, individual designs must resolve concurrency issues wit h other individual designs. These issues are not appropriately address ed by the traditional serial design process. The problems with the cur rent design paradigm for manufacturing systems are also exacerbated by temporal life cycle issues. Because the design life cycle of these sy stems often span months or years, the inevitable changes during design stages can create costly delays. In view of these issues, then, it is suggested that the manufacturing systems design process must become l ess serial and more concurrent, as with concurrent product design. Coo rdinating the design efforts of the multi-disciplinary teams involved in the design of manufacturing systems is a difficult task. These vari ous disciplines utilize different methods and the designers have their own tools for executing these methodologies. Solving these problems r equires a new technology which enables prototyping of complex multi-mo del manufacturing systems. Therefore, an integration technology is pro posed that enables the systematic integration of new design tools and thus is readily extendible to include new design domains, methodologie s, and technology. In this paper, the manufacturing systems design pro blem is characterized and an architecture presented which supports man ufacturing engineering in this complex, data-rich environment.