A SIMULATION-BASED EQUIPMENT ENVIRONMENT FOR FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

The paper discusses a new simulation environment which provides a cell controller to coordinate equipment within a cell to perform a sequence of manufacturing operations. The intended advantage of the simulation environment is that, the designer can make experimental tests in a computer and does not need the actual manufacturing equipment. To our knowledge, this is the first work that employs the simulation environment to fit the real-word manufacturing factory. We start with scenario to model the operation sequences of the system's equipment. The scenario methodology is able to depict the communication signals for the equipment clearly. Finally, two examples are proposed for the simulation environment.