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Item Low cost shop floor DNC system : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the postgraduate Masters of Technology in Automation & Control at Massey University(Massey University, 2002) Ma, William H YDirect/Distributed Numerical Control (DNC) has a vital role in delivering a successful Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) strategy. DNC is the most popular form of factory automation system in the shop floor environment. Its core function is to enable manufacturing information to flow smoothly and efficiently to and from the shop floor facilities. The current New Zealand small to medium manufacturers are unwilling to make large financial investment in the more expensive packages, and hence, there is a need for a cost effective DNC application software within this sector of the industry. The research conducted for this project focuses on the application of a multiport serial card, and the development of a low cost DNC application software that can be implemented in the small to medium size companies for transferring data and other manufacturing data such as drawing files, and computerised numerical control (CNC) programs. In addition, the research also looks at methods to allow remote access to the system through the World Wide Web (WWW). In order to achieve the objectives mentioned above, a powerful and user-friendly user interface programming tool kit — Borland's Delphi 4 was adopted as the key development tool. Delphi 4 is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) package that is fully compatible to the Multiport's senal programming library, and majority of the Microsoft's remote access technology such as Object Linking and Embedding technology (OLE) or ActiveX.Item Design and development of a hybrid flexible manufacturing system : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology at Massey University(Massey University, 1999) Jolly, Matthew JThe ability of a manufacturing environment to be able to modify itself and to incorporate a wide variety of heterogeneous multi-vendor devices is becoming a matter of increasing importance in the modern manufacturing enterprise. Many companies in the past have been forced to procure devices which are compatible with existing systems but are not as suitable as other less compatible devices. The inability to be able to integrate new devices into an existing company has made such enterprises dependent on one vendor and has decreased their ability to be able to respond to changes in the market. It is said that typically 60% of orders received in a company are new orders. Therefore the ability of a company to be able to reconfigure itself and respond to such demands and reintegrate itself with new equipment requirements is of paramount importance. In the past much effort has been made towards the integration of shop floor devices in industry whereby such devices can communicate with each other so that certain tasks are able to be achieved in a single environment. Up until recently however much of this was carried out in a very much improvised fashion with no real structure existing within the factory. This meant that once the factory was set up it became a hard-wired entity and extensibility and modiflability were difficult indeed. When formalised Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system architectures were developed it was found that although they solved many existing shortcomings there were inherent problems associated with these as well. What became apparent was that a fresh approach was required that took the advantages of existing architectures and combined them into an new architecture that not only capitalised on these advantages but also nullified the weaknesses of the existing systems. This thesis outlines the design of a new FMS architecture and its implementation in a factory environment on a PC based system.Item Design & development of a simulation model to analyse scheduling rules in an FMS in a virtual manufacturing environment : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Manufacturing and Industrial Technology at Massey University(Massey University, 1997) Talla, Ajay BhushanDue to the rapid changes in the needs of the customer for new products, the future manufacturing systems must cope with these changes. Hence, the need for the manufacturing systems to support these changes in the products with shorter lead times within a single manufacturing facility. The Virtual Manufacturing System (VMS) is one concept which can assist in meeting these demands. The VMS concept enables the manufacturing system designers to emulate and test the performance of the future manufacturing systems. This research has given an overview of the new concepts of Virtual Manufacturing Systems and Virtual Manufacturing in general. A Virtual Reality Software tool has been used to realise the VMS concept. A Virtual Manufacturing Environment representing a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) has been modelled. A simulation control language is employed for developing simulation control logics and decision making control logics for the development of the FMS model. The modelled FMS is implemented and tested through simulation experiments. The testing is done by analysing the traditional scheduling rules in a manufacturing facility. Average Machine Utilisation, Mean Flow Time, Average Queue Lengths and the System Production Rate are measured as the System Performance Measures for the evaluation of the scheduling rules. This research has identified that the Virtual Manufacturing Software is a powerful tool which can identify optimum configurations and highlight potential problems before a final and expensive manufacturing system is established physically.