Research on Plant Layout and Production Line Running Simulation in Digital Factory Environment

Digital factory is a new technology to construct a virtual plant environment to implement integration between process planning and manufacturing execution. Object-oriented technology is introduced to simulate complicated discrete-events system with constructing four basic objects including product, process, planning and resource in digital factory environment. Especially manufacturing resource library (MRL) based on visual display and single data source technology is built to contain all resources to support manufacturing process. The manufacturing resources can be imported and configured to construct a virtual digital factory. By means of digital factory technology, product design, manufacturing process, production planning can be simulated, analyzed and optimized in digital factory through data integration with other information systems. Therefore the uncertainty between design-planning and product manufacturing is reduced, and success rate and reliability of manufacturing system can be improved. Altogether digital factory technology is a new production organizational mode which runs through the whole product lifecycle.