A 3D Simulator for Optimizing Production Line System

Many companies employ line production system (LPS) for producing their products in large volume. The design and installation of LPS takes enormous amount of time and costs. If any fatal troubles become obvious after the line installation, they cause heavy monetary and temporal damages to the companies. Whereas discovering any trouble spots during design phase is a crucial challenge, the advanced detection of the troubles is a very difficult issue. We propose an LPS simulator allowing user to prototype a planned production line in a 3D virtual environment and put it in action for detecting potential trouble spots and bottlenecks before the installation. In this paper, we describe principal functions of the proposed system including virtual prototyping for designing and verifying a production line in a 3D virtual space and real-time and batch simulation functions based on 3D computer graphics.