A VIRTUAL TESTBED FOR THE LIFE-CYCLE DESIGN OF AUTOMATED MANUFACTURING FACILITIES

A large-scale automated manufacturing facility employs various types o f automated machines and equipment including material handling and mat erial processing systems. It typically involves extremely complicated operations to achieve the desired performance with less or no manual l abour. Design of such a complete system requires a series of difficult design and implementation tasks. This paper describes a virtual testb ed to support the life-cycle design of large-scale automated manufactu ring facilities such as the postal mail process facility and gear manu facturing factory. The architecture of the virtual testbed is based in the extended real-time control system. The virtual environment provid es the design engineer with a unique way of considering all functions of life-cycle system support in the process of facility design. Two ex amples are given to illustrate the effectiveness and extent of the vir tual design system.