2017 Volume 30 Issue 3 Pages 97-103
Recently, while planning the design and operation of a production line, it has become common to simulate production conditions on a virtual factory. A virtual factory is constructed by virtual equipment. Virtual equipment is usually implemented in a virtual factory as a software agent which is a model of the real equipment. For a simulation of electric power consumption, behavior of the equipment should be modeled because power consumption depends on the equipment status such as operation and idling. Requirements for the equipment model were provided by the experimental implementation of a multi-agent based simulation system. In this paper, the method for developing an equipment model which fulfills the requirements is introduced. An equipment model has not only property descriptions but also behavior descriptions with computational expressions for calculating electric power consumption. Some of the variables in the computation expression are given values from the production schedule data, operation data and product data when a simulation is executed. Furthermore, to easily construct a virtual factory, the use of an equipment e-catalogue library is proposed. An equipment e-catalogue is generated by fulfilling values of the template. A template is a formal description of an equipment model.
