Modeling and evaluation tool for supporting decisions on the design of reconfigurable machine tools

Reconfigurable machine tools are proposed as manufacturing concepts to cope with turbulent and quickly changing business environments. New tools for efficient modeling of different machine variants are required to facilitate and accelerate the reconfiguration of machine tools. This paper presents a software tool that allows the evaluation of the performance and conformance to requirements of machine structure variants at an early stage. In contrast to computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) tools that process numerical control (NC) code to predict the tool trajectory, this tool calculates the static and simulates the dynamic properties of the machine structure as a basis for machine evaluation. Models of different structure variants are assembled using a module library, which contains models of the available physical modules. Thus, different variants can be set up and analyzed efficiently, significantly improving the data basis on which important and far-reaching decisions have to be made. An example illustrates how the tool can be used for obtaining information on the physical machine properties and how to interpret the results. The presented software tool is part of a methodology for the reconfiguration process of reconfigurable, modular machine tools.