Abstract
In today's economy the product life cycle has been shortened. There is a new challenge for manufacturers: high quality products are to be produced, the introduction time is very short and the costs must be as low as possible. PLM is an engineering solution to address this challenge. It allows for users to analyse and manage products through the whole product lifecycle. A manufacturing system is usually a large investment, it consists mostly of equipment and software to operate them. The integration of these part systems is time-consuming, and means high costs. To establish an efficient manufacturing system design the dynamic model of the organizations is useful. It makes possible to perform “what-if” analysis, but it needs experts in construction and in result analysis. Nowadays production tasks need a very complex planning process beforehand. This is caused by the high amount of variants of one product. We can speak here about vehicle or engine production. This often is a very challenging planning and production process. The tools and methods of the digital factory can be helpful in order to solve these challenges. Product and production planning not only have a large number of influencing parameters, but the combination of these parameters causes a lot of options and problems to solve. In practice there is not enough time to fulfil the mathematical analysis manually, even if the right behaviour functions are ready to use. The digital factory is the generic term for an extensive network of digital models and methods, including simulation and 3D visualization. Its purpose is the integrated planning, implementation and continuous improvement in all factory processes and resources associated with the product. This paper describes the steps of simulation modelling inside digital factory at Audi Hungaria Motor Ltd., showing example for different application goals.
KEYWORDS – digital factory, production planning, simulation, optimisation, genetic algorithm