the factory of the future we're making a
new pot or replacing an old one will be
as automatic as getting a hardcopy on
your home computer printer it may sound
like science fiction but it's being
developed right now in the automated
manufacturing research facility at the
National Institute of Standards and
Technology manufacturing is important to
the United States economy wherever we
have trouble with offshore competition
it turns out that manufacturing is a
major part of the problem this shows up
in terms of quality cost and speed in
going to market from its initial work in
discrete parts manufacturing in the
early eighties to its more recent work
on composites and metal atomization the
AM RF has concentrated on integrating a
variety of manufacturing components
equipment computers and people
the first phase was the development of
techniques and software needed to
integrate machines on the shop floor a
great deal of effort was devoted to
simply getting these machines to work
together
we are now in the second phase of
development concerned with determining
how data needed to manufacture a part is
generated stored is made available when
needed and how to make sure it is in the
right form
to understand the complexities of this
task one must first look at five
manufacturing steps in the factory of
the future designed process planning
offline programming shop floor control
and manufacturing processes the first
step is to create the specifications for
a part with the help of computer-aided
design programs once the part has been
designed using the CAD system and other
engineering analysis tools that data is
communicated to a process planning
system this system determines the steps
to be taken in order to make the part
the kind of tools needed and the
sequence in which they will be used the
next step is to use offline programming
to generate the data to drive each piece
of equipment specified in the process
plan
offline programming along with process
planning and design form the foundation
for concurrent engineering all this data
is then made available to the control
function then the real-time planning and
scheduling of the work can be done the
data is then communicated to a system of
workstations the part is machined
deburred and inspected using the control
and machining system developed by NIS T
the first step in this integrated
process is to build a detailed
architecture which describes the
functionality the relationships and the
interfaces of those manufacturing
components the second step is to provide
the protocols and standards which allow
the computers to talk to one another
across their assigned interfaces the
third step is to provide the standards
which allow for storing retrieving
displaying and exchanging the
information they need to carry out their
assigned functions NIH team strategy was
to develop two separate kinds of
interfaces one to manage the retrieval
of data from a variety of data
repositories and another to enable the
engineering and control functions to
communicate with each other let's
examine the second interface first in
manufacturing a complex part it is often
necessary for a wide variety of CAD
systems at different companies to be
able to exchange information
the first attempt to do this was called
ages the initial graphics exchange
specification it provides a neutral
format for the exchange of
computer-aided design data but it has
some limitations for use by downstream
planning and manufacturing process
I just drawing notes and annotations
were really intended for human
consumption tolerance and surface finish
information is not tied directly to the
geometry of the part and this makes it
unusable by automated systems the most
recent attempt to extend the
capabilities of August is called step
the standard for the exchange of product
model data step is intended to support a
wide variety of applications which cover
the life cycle of the product from
design through manufacture and support
the step standard is designed to be
extensible and not limited to file
exchange technology the u.s. effort to
develop the international standard step
is known as pedis which stands for
product data exchange using step a major
focus of the product data sharing effort
is the development of the national PDS
testbed the national PDS testbed will
provide a testing based foundation for
the development of product data
standards the testbed supports PDS Inc a
major industrial consortium the
consortium consists of more than 25
member companies that have a strong
interest in product data sharing
technology the testbed provides systems
software and personnel to these tests
and evaluation efforts what I've
observed is that within the peta sync
effort itself there's an enormous amount
of sharing and that accelerates the
whole process companies that become
involved early on in the pedis
initiative will have a great opportunity
to develop a competitive edge NISD is
also continuing to refine the rest of
the interfaces which drive the functions
that generate all the day
needing to plan schedule manufacture and
inspect each individual part step
provides one of the key interfaces for
exchanging data between manufacturing
functions these interfaces will allow
the paperless exchange of data between
manufacturing functions which control
the flow of production across different
factory equipment three of these
manufacturing functions include process
planning scheduling and offline
programming offline programming is also
used to create simulations or animations
of actual manufacturing activities here
a programmer manipulates a graphical
representation of the robot to perform a
task that he'd like to perform once the
programmer is satisfied that the program
is actually operating the way he'd like
he can then download that information to
an actual robot which will then perform
the task determining the information
that goes across functional components
is one of the main problems of
integrating commercial hardware and
software packages one candidate
developed at NIS T is known as out a
language for process specification Alpes
provides a single representation for
process plans which can be used by
individual shop floor control subsystems
to generate their own plans and
schedules it's important to test the
interaction between the various
subsystems on a factory floor however a
lot of this testing doesn't require any
actual manufacturing to take place what
you're looking for is the orderly
startup and shutdown in the various
systems identifying deadlock situations
or unstable situations so to do that
kind of testing with the actual factory
floor equipment would be prohibitively
expensive instead what's better is to
try and do as much as that testing as
possible with emulated systems and that
way you can identify the weaknesses and
only at the end of the testing phase do
you actually swap in the real factory
floor equipment
the answer was to develop a control
system in which shop floor hardware is
simulated or animated but this is only a
partial test to validate that product
data is communicated completely
accurately and unambiguously to finish
the validation process the software must
also drive the real hardware at the
cleaning and deburring workstation both
types of validation are being
demonstrated the same information used
to drive simulations drives the real
equipment here when the factory sends
information to the workstation you can
no longer tell whether the robot or a
simulation of the robot is actually
performing the operation this allows us
to debug high-level programs without
using the robot the second type of
standards called for by n is T's
strategy our standards for the
structuring and retrieving of
manufacturing data the major problem in
sharing and integrating manufacturing
information is diversity there is no
commonality among database systems
access methods or even the information
model used by the various engineering
systems production management and
scheduling systems and control systems
the solution was M dos the integrated
manufacturing data administration system
this is how it works
when a user needs some data a query is
sent to M dos which takes care of
translation distribution and routing
indus forwards the inquiry on to the
appropriate Data Manager the data may
reside in one computer or in many
computers at locations all over the
country him das receives the information
the user needs and then assembles and
delivers it back to the user in the
appropriate form the entire in distress'
parent to the user M das was originally
designed it solve a very practical
problem access from the control systems
on the MRF floor to geometry information
scheduling information and control
programs and possibly other
manufacturing information wherever it
might reside as it turns out the
standard interfaces the standard forms
of data exchange and the integrating
information model all of which were
necessary to the distributed system may
have turned out to be the most important
parts of the project these systems have
been shown to work with relational
systems with object-oriented systems and
with file systems in short with
virtually any system in which
manufacturing data might design one of a
MRFs goals is to support development of
international standards in all areas of
manufacturing so that it is possible to
easily substitute the hardware and
software of different vendors in the
system what we're trying to do here at
the NIST automated manufacturing
research facility is to do research to
develop better measurement techniques
and to help develop standards for the
effective application of computer
technology to these manufacturing
problems
to compete and win in the international
arena the United States companies are
simply going to have to offer product
and services that are world-class
you