Virtual Manufacturing Technology Overview

With the intensification of global competition, the competition between enterprises has evolved from local competition in the past to global competition; the mutual penetration and competition between the same industry and cross-industry has become increasingly fierce. In order to adapt to the rapidly changing market demand, enterprises must meet the needs of different customers with the fastest time to market (T), the best quality Q (quality), the lowest cost C (cost) and the best service S (service). This poses a serious challenge to traditional manufacturing techniques. With the advent of advanced technologies such as computer networks and virtual reality, a new manufacturing concept and theory—virtual manufacturing (VM) was created in the 1990s, and its new manufacturing systems and models have become modern manufacturing technologies and The inevitable trend of system development.

What is a VM? At present, countries have not yet formed a unified understanding. The general understanding is that a virtual production system model is constructed in a computer to simulate the actual production process. From the point of view of information transformation equivalence, this paper analyzes the mutual correspondence between VM system and actual production system, discusses the basic concepts of VM, and introduces the methods and means of VM research at present, the trend of research and development and the broad application of VM. prospect.

1 VMT research status, existing problems and development prospects

Although VMT was proposed at an early stage, it has been rapidly developed and achieved great success, but it has been

VMT has not yet fully realized the whole process of product design, which is mainly manifested in:

a) Integrated digital product model technology is still in the concept stage: VM requires research based on integrated digital product model. However, research work in this area has just begun, and many related technologies are still in the concept stage, which needs further research. Specifically, it includes: 1) The content of product information in the current CAD model is too low. The model in the VM needs to extract the corresponding information from the CAD model. However, the current CAD model mainly describes the product from the perspective of geometric entities. Although some CAD models add information such as shape features and materials and tolerances, they are far from comprehensive description of the product, and the product information that can be shared is still too small. Non-geometric product information; 2) The existing CAD model can not support the conceptual design of the product, can only support the detailed design of the product; 3) lack of good product information reuse mechanism. At present, product data exchange between application software is mainly realized through a dedicated interface, and this conversion must be a simple mapping of data of the same problem domain (such as geometry), which is bound to increase the complexity of the virtual product development system, and Automatic conversion and derivation of data between models is not possible. In fact, due to the different problem domains of the information described by each software system, appropriate deductive reasoning is sometimes performed during data conversion to properly convert the described data objects;

b) Product innovation support tools are not yet sufficient: At present, product innovation support technology has made some progress, with some support tools, such as UGII's WAVE, Pro/Engineering layout, but there are requirements for VM innovation support technology. A certain distance, mainly in: 1) lack of innovative design support system. The VM environment provides a good operating mechanism for innovative design, but how to achieve innovative design also requires the organization to develop innovative design support systems; 2) the lack of tools to combine knowledge with VMs. How to combine knowledge with VM digital products is a difficult problem to be solved; 3) lack of interactive form factor design technology and VM integration tools. How to integrate the product's overall positioning, appearance quality and industrial design-centered product interactive exterior design technology into VM and organic integration remains to be studied; 4) Lack of tools to support reverse (reverse) design. At present, there are still a lot of unsolved problems in reverse design, such as measurement data processing technology with random measurement error and repair technology of defective data, which need further improvement and improvement;

c) Product digitization technology: 1) Integration of product data management and other application software. In the virtual environment, all professional and department personnel work together in the same product model, and must solve the integration problem of product data management and other application software systems such as MRPII, CAD, WEB browser, etc.; 2) Product data organization of virtual product development system. The product structure tree of the product digital prototype generated by the virtual product development method not only reflects the structural hierarchy of the product design stage, but also reflects the assembly sequence and production process of the product. Therefore, it is necessary to study the product data organization system suitable for virtual product development; 3) organize and manage the data related to the digital product model. How to effectively solve the organization and management of related data to make it suitable for VM is a hot spot in international research.

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