Digital Manufacturing based Modeling and Simulation of Production Process in Subassembly Lines at a Shipyard

디지털 생산을 기반으로 한 조선 소조립 공정 모델링 및 시뮬레이션

Digital Manufacturing-based production could be very effective in shipbuilding in order to save costs and time, to increase safety for workers, and to prevent bottleneck processes in advance. Digital shipbuilding system, a simulation-based production tool, is being developed to achieve such aspects in Korea. To simulate material flow in a subassembly line at a shipyard, the product, process and resources was modeled for the subassembly process which consisted of several sub-processes such as tack welding, piece alignment, tack welding, and robot welding processes. The analysis and modeling were carried out by using the UML(Unified Modeling Language), an object-oriented modeling method as well as IDEF(Integration DEFinition), a functional modeling tool. Initially, the characteristics of the shop resources were analyzed using the shipyard data, and the layout of the subassembly line was designed with the resources. The production process modeling of the subassembly lines was performed using the discrete event simulation method. Using the constructed resource and process model, the productivity and efficiency of the line were investigated. The number of workers and the variations In the resource performance such as that of a new welding robot were examined to simulate the changes in productivity. The bottleneck process floated according to the performance of the new resources. The proposed model was viewed three-dimensionally in a digital environment so that interferences among objects and space allocations for the resources could be easily investigated