Production lines
Sequence of standardised workstations connected by conveyor technology
Connecting conveyor technology
Conveyor or transfer technology in production lines ensures that materials and components are transferred synchronised or asynchronously between the stations. In principle, any technology can be used here, such as roller conveyors, power-and-free, EMS or AGVs, or even a combination of all of these. WinMOD-SIMLINE offers a customised library of 3D elements and virtual drives for each of these conveyor systems. These can be combined with each other so that a complete virtual material flow can be simulated.
Components and materials are integrated directly as CAD imports or selected from our 3D component libraries. With virtual commissioning (VIBN), it is then possible to simulate large conveyor systems with many parts in real time in order to calculate cycle times and throughput as well as line balancing (bottleneck management) or to determine buffer dimensioning and changeover times.
Assembly, processing, testing
The actual assembly, machining and testing processes take place in the stations. It is often the case that stations have their own control systems and these can come from completely different manufacturers. Flexibility is therefore a crucial criterion for a VIBN system. With WinMOD, you can connect multiple and different controllers to your system simultaneously via different bus systems simply and efficiently.
Depending on the desired simulation depth, the CAD data of the stations can be integrated in order to simulate manufacturing and testing processes in 3D in real time. If, on the other hand, the focus is more on the overall system, it makes sense to create the stations as black box units that output components of type Z after a defined processing time X. This simplified behaviour can also be simulated in WinMOD-SIMLINE; it is then not necessary to integrate a control system.
