Automatic Manufacturing Cell in Cyber-physical System

Abstract

Such manufacturing cells, that need to be able to produce high quantity and variety workpieces, the automatic workpiece handling is indispensable to stay in competition. A real manufacturing cell’s simulation in a cyber-physical system can help the decisions-making in the production, as we receive real data with the simulation of the scenarios. Our manufacturing cell consists of a 6-axis robot, 2 CNC milling machines and 4 conveyors. We tested 10 different scenarios, during which we analyzed the usage of the robot and the milling machines. By upgrading the tools, used for milling, we could reduce the cycle time of the workpieces. Furthermore, one more milling machine could be integrated into the cell due to the low usage of the robot or the speed of the robot could be lowered. Besides, filling the pallets with the same workpieces was the most effective way, however, with mixed workpieces we reached better results when we used optimization for cycle time. In these cases, reducing the order quantity to a daily amount did not cause any capacity reduction.