In a previous study [10], we proposed the architecture for human-centered VMS (virtual manufacturing system) whose objectives were to expand the capabilities of humans and to support their creativity and collaboration among people within a manufacturi...
In a previous study [10], we proposed the architecture for human-centered VMS (virtual manufacturing system) whose objectives were to expand the capabilities of humans and to support their creativity and collaboration among people within a manufacturing system. Presented in this paper is the architecture for a virtual factory emulator as a component of the human-centered VMS. The virtual factory emulator is used to construct a factory model consisting of a variety of virtual manufacturing devices and then to emulate its operations according to human-defined scenarios that are either manually defined by users or automatically generated from schedules. To represent a manufacturing device, the concept of hierarchical VMD (virtual manufacturing device) consisting of two parts, shell and core, is proposed. For efficient modeling of emulation scenarios, a hierarchical command structure together with a graphical modeling method based on the activity diagram of the UML [8] is employed, while the abstract emulation architecture adopting the Zeigler's DEVS formalism [12] is proposed for executing emulation scenarios.