An approach for knowledge-driven product, process and resource mappings for assembly automation

The rapid development and reconfiguration of assembly automation systems to accommodate product changes in a short period of time is a challenging task due to the limitations of the contemporary automation systems engineering approach. To improve the engineering process, Product Process Resource (PPR)-based modeling, simulation and data integration systems emerged as a promising approach to compress the development time and engineering cost by enabling collaboration and realization of product and manufacturing resources in a virtual environment. However, due to ineffective coupling of PPR data, design and reconfiguration of assembly systems is still a challenging task and is highly dependent on the knowledge and experience of engineers. This paper presents a knowledge-driven engineering approach to manage the mapping of engineering data sets to interconnect product attributes to manufacturing process and resources. A case study based on a Festo test rig is presented for illustrating the implementation of the approach. The successful identification of the tasks required to manufacture a product proves the approach concept but only for the presented use case.