Flexible Manufacturing Cells (FMC) may be considered the most significant development in small batch manufacturing. Setting up and operating costs prove to be the most major hindrance to large scale implementation and use of the FMCs, particularly by small and medium size industries. Incompatibility between the different components constituting the cells, and the lack of a unified language/approach to programming and coordinating them, are cited as the cause of the complexity of setting up and subsequently operating the cells. In order to eliminate these difficulties, a new philosophy for setting up, programming, and control of FMCs has been developed. This thesis reports part of the effort for developing the new "UniSet" philosophy and the components of the UniSet Environment. UniSet has been developed as a Unified Manufacturing Instruction Set based on a comparison of machine tool and programming primitives. UniSet allows programmers, if they so desire, to concentrate on only one instruction set rather than numerous machine programming languages. Task level UniSet has been designed using an object-oriented and a knowledge based approach to eliminate cell programming difficulties. An expert cell programmer can be replaced by a less experienced manufacturing operator. A software environment for Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), called UniSet Environment, has been developed to address the shortcomings of setting up and operating FMCs comprising incompatible components from the different suppliers. The UniSet Environment provides the users with a consistent platform to configure, program, simulate, and control an FMC irrespective of the nature of its constituents. The Environment is coded an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) language, Smalltalk. The Environment consists of four modules which capture complete information about the cell program, existing cell facilities and databases, and distribute the information into the corresponding Object Models. Each of the module is responsible for a specific function. The Setup module is primarily used for defining the cell, its components and their functionalities, and reconfiguring a cell or building preparation databases. The Programming module allows the user to edit cell programs which may be developed in UniSet, Task level UniSet, or native machine languages. The programs written in Task level UniSet are used to generate detailed UniSet codes which are translated into specific machine codes by the generation and translation module. The Simulation/Compilation module is used for generating the control structure--Task Initiation Diagram (TID)--for the operation of the cell according to the user program as well as knowledge contained in the databases. The Control module is used to coordinate the workstation, as well as carry out the task of harmonizing between the different communication protocols of the devices.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/9666 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Choi, Kyunghyun. |
| Contributors | Fahim, Atef, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 249 p. |
Page generated in 0.0015 seconds