35 E-Catalogues of Equipment for Constructing an Injection …
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Fig. 35.12 Example display during the simulation
35.6 Conclusions
A virtual production line is a core of the digital eco factory. Environmental performance simulation on a virtual production system provides useful results for planning, operation and execution of sustainable manufacturing. The proposed virtual
production line construction method using equipment catalogues has made possible
a model-based construction.
A virtual production line is constructed as a multi-agent system. Its components
are equipment agents which are derived from equipment catalogues. In other words,
an equipment catalogue is a static description of an equipment model including its
behavior. And an equipment agent is an executable model which is derived from the
static description. As a result, a production line is modeled as a multi-agent system
on which simulation is executable.
In this paper, the method for e-cataloging of equipment has been extended for
constructing a digital eco-factory for injection molding with more complicated
interactions among equipment. This extension indicates that the digital eco-factory
with proposed e-cataloging method can be applied to more complicated production
systems.
As a future work, by using implemented trial systems, experimental usage of a
digital eco-factory is planned in industries. The result of the trial usage will show the
feasibility of the proposed method and will lead to further practical developments in
a digital eco-factory.