Research on Simulation and Evaluation of Production Running in Digital Factory Environment

Digital factory is a new technology to construct a virtual plant framework to integrate manufacturing process planning with manufacturing execution. Object-Oriented technology is introduced to simulate complicated discrete production system. And a virtual factory is constructed in digital environment. In this paper, manufacturing resource library is built to manage manufacturing equipments and all the other resources to support production process. Especially intelligent digital models of manufacturing equipments can apperceive change of performance state. Accordingly time-varying manufacturing capability of equipments can be acquired as basic elements of production evaluation system. Through coupling production capability of equipments, hierarchical manufacturing capabilities of production line and plant may be estimated respectively in simulation system. By means of digital factory technology, product design, manufacturing process, production planning can be verified and optimized through production running simulation. Altogether digital factory technology is a new production organizational mode which runs through the whole product lifecycle.