A virtual testbed for the life-cycle design of automated manufacturing facilities

A large-scale automated manufacturing facility employs various types of automated machines and equipment including material handling and material processing systems. It typically involves extremely complicated operations to achieve the desired performance with less or no manual labour. Design of such a complete system requires a series of difficult design and implementation tasks. This paper describes a virtual testbed to support the life-cycle design of large-scale automated manufacturing facilities such as the postal mail process facility and gear manufacturing factory. The architecture of the virtual testbed is based on the extended real-time control system. The virtual environment provides the design engineer with a unique way of considering all functions of life-cycle system support in the process of facility design. Two examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness and extent of the virtual design system.