White Car Body Assembly Line Simulation-based Virtual Manufacturing And Planning

Virtual Manufacturing (VM) is a new manufacturing technology born in eighties last century. Based on Information Technology, Simulation Technology and Virtual Reality, it could evaluate running performance of a product or a manufacturing system before making a real one, thus a prospective decision and optimize executive plan could be made. In this paper, based on Virtual Manufacturing software RobCAD, the work-cell balance and robot welding procedures were simulated and optimized using mathematic plan algorithm, thus rationality and applicability of welding line were improved, and manufacturing cost would be reduced.There are two levels of techniques to advance manufacturing efficiency of welding productive line and reduce manufacturing cost. The first one is systematic simulation and planning, which make it by assigning processing between work-cells; the other level is simulation and planning on level of work-cells, which advance manufacturing efficiency by simulation and planning procedures and time sequence of a work-cell.By systematic simulation and planning, method of planning processing assignment was studied to achieve a minimized amount of work-cells. Using Genetic Algorithm, systematic planning was performed, and a program was developed by C++, finally an effective automatic planning was performed.By work-cells simulation and planning, welding work assignment and weld path optimizing were studied based on RobCAD, and automatic planning by Genetic Algorithm and C-W Algorithm were presented. Finally rationality of work process was validated by RobCAD and the optimizing means of procedure and time sequence were researched.In this paper, planning algorithms of welding line were researched, and technical measures of simulation and planning of welding line were studied based on RobCAD, thus design efficiency and quality of welding line were improved, and difficulty and periodic time of performing a simulation were reduced.