Facility description language for integrating distributed designs

A principal goal of concurrent engineering has been to reduce the developme nt cycle and time-to-market for new products. The success of such efforts b rings about a parallel need for rapid design, evaluation, and reconfigurati on of the facilities required to manufacture these products. Traditional fa cility layout methods rely on a sequence of actions progressing through a s eries of increasingly detailed analyses. More recent techniques automate an d improve this process. However, there has been little progress toward an i ntegrated facility design environment that would support the interactions o f multidisciplinary designer teams. Such teams have been created with signi ficant benefits for realizing the concurrent engineering process, and can b e more effective if given a common design language. This article describes the generic Facility Description Language (FDL), which provides a common fo rmal base for collaborative work and detailed analysis of process layout, h ow geometry, visual aspects of control and safety. FDL augments the capabil ities of simulator-emulator design workstations to integrate the physical a nd logical aspects of production facility design. Specifically, our researc h has defined the basic features and functions of FDL and resulted in a pro totype implementation architecture. FDL can serve as a useful structure for the definition and description of a production facility at different level s of abstraction, allowing the same basic design model to be iteratively re fined throughout the development process. It is demonstrated how an interac tive graphical environment provides a powerful modelling tool that permits distributed users to achieve a higher level of design synergy.