Major Technology 9: Digital Factory—DF

Abstract

Virtual Product Creation has the task to prepare for successful fabrication and production of products, which have been developed beforehand with the help of virtual models and tools. This chapter Digital Factory explains from the German understanding of establishing an equivalent term to the ordinary, physical factory in order to describe all critical digital modeling and simulation capabilities as part of digital manufacturing which are not related to the (classical) major CAPP, CAM and NC technologies (compare chapter 9). Firstly, this chapter provides the definition of Digital Factory, a solid understanding of its integration into the core of the corporate enterprise processes and the overall interaction amongst the specific Digital Factory planning activities. Secondly, it explains the different phases of Digital Factory as well as its overall technical and deployment set-up in industry. The system architecture of the Digital Factory is described and examples are given in the context of automation/robot simulation, logistics and production flow simulation as well as manual labor analysis. This chapter also introduces the major Digital Factory disciplines such as 2D and 3D layout planning, Factory Digital Mock-Up and production event simulations. Finally, multi-disciplinary plant engineering activities such as simulation of machine and resource behaviors (e.g. as part of production cells), intelligent PLC type of numeric and electronic control are introduced together with other advanced technologies for the future.