Emulation in manufacturing engineering processes

In our research, the manufacturing system emulation technology is proposed as one of the frontloading methods in the manufacturing system implementation phase. In this paper, the roles of the manufacturing system emulation technology in manufacturing engineering processes are summarized based on our analysis for the typical manufacturing engineering processes. The manufacturing system emulation environment (MSEE) to implement the manufacturing system emulation is proposed and developed. MSEE consists of our developed manufacturing cell emulator, our developed soft-wiring system, and the industrial network middleware which is one of the semi-standard middlewares. The validation of our proposed environment was carried out through a case study.