Toward rapid prototyping of manufacturing facilities

A manufacturing facility can be viewed as a material flow network in which each node represents a delay (either for storage, transformation, or testing), and each arc represents a transport operation (which also may involve a significant delay). The loads on this material flow network result from the interaction of bills of materials, process plans, and production schedules, and are constrained by the capacities of the nodes and arcs. Efforts toward rapid prototyping have focussed on the specification of the material flow network, in particular, the selection of both processing and handling equipment and the layout of the facility. This work begins with the development of an engineering workstation environment for specifying automated guided vehicle system applications. This workstation employs AutoCad for creating the basic facility description, and for creating and modifying the configuration of the material handling system. By carefully defining blocks in the CAD system, it is possible to extract and post-process information about the design and certain constraints so that it is accessible to analytic routines outside the CAD package. The menu structure has been customized to make all the analysis and design routines accessible through the CAD menu