Visual Analysis of Advanced Manufacturing Simulations

Abstract

Today's manufacturing companies are faced with requests for highly customer-specific products that come in numerous variants but small numbers of units per variant. Therefore, their manufacturing processes need to be flexible and versatile. This opens up opportunities for real-time process planning, yet there is insufficient tool support for process planning that is not done days or weeks in advance. As a result, there is little incentive to collect process data on site. We describe a visual analysis tool that uses advanced manufacturing simulation to evaluate and optimize flexible manufacturing processes.