An integrated manufacturing systems design environment

Manufacturing systems design includes the determination of the, manufacturing operations, operation sequence, spatial layout, and part routings required to make a part. Currently, manufacturing systems design is done by a team of experts. Such an approach is prone to errors. Also, unfortunately, during this process there is usually no documentation of the decision making criteria; this makes successful designs hard to reproduce, especially by different experts. The work reported in this paper shows a technical approach to an Integrated Manufacturing Systems Design Workstation which uses software techniques to collect and organize the data, develop the manufacturing system design and validate the design using discrete event simulation. The workstation is composed of commercially available tools integrated together into a single seamless package.