Virtual Factory for Electronics Assembly Industry

Funded by the Singapore National Science and Technology Board (NSTB), CAMTech is collaborating with a Singaporean research institute and two industry partners with the objective to improve electronics assembly processes. The goal of this project is to visualise the behaviour of an electronics assembly industry by simulating, visualising the discrete events of the entire manufacturing processes and observing the flow of materials, size of buffers, and line balancing. The traditional scenario - from the customer placing order for a product to delivery - goes through various phases including manufacturing the product. Several major electronics manufacturing stages can be addressed: fabrication, assembly, testing, and packing. Each of these stages accounts for set up, process, failure, and wait time periods. A delay in one process will accumulate over to the future delays. To simulate the discrete events a general-purpose simulation system has been employed. For modelling and visualisation CASUS (Computer Animation of Simulation Traces) system has been used developed by Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (Fraunhofer-IGD). This work focuses on the prototype interface between simulation trace file and CASUS animation scripts. The final system provides a 3-D visualisation of electronics assembly processes based on event oriented simulator data.