Annual Report Department

3.5CAD/CAM, process and production planning

3.5.1DWTC Project no. EU/01/011, Factory and no. EU/01/018 Factory 2: Eureka Factory

Partners: Krypton (B), Picanol (B), K.U.Leuven-PMA

Objective: Eureka is a Europe-wide network promoting collaborative market-driven research & development projects in most fields of advanced civilian technology. Factory is the Eureka umbrella devoted to generating and supporting projects in the area of production. The Factory network is a flexible communication network within industry with the overall goal of helping to develop Europe’s industrial competitiveness. The network supports European R&D projects in the following domains: 1) production methods and product design, 2) production systems and technologies, 3) organisational aspects and human resource development concerned with improvements in manufacturing and business processes.

Period: Apr 1999 – Mar 2003

Contact: H. Van Brussel

3.5.2GOA Project: AgCo2 - Concerted Action on Agents for Coordination and Control

Partners: K.U.Leuven

Objective: This project proposes research and development on agent technology for coordination and control applications in engineering systems. The approach followed is case-driven. This ensures the necessary interaction between theoretical results and their practical applicability. The application domains are sufficiently diverse to validate the proposed concepts. The nature of the project necessitates multidisciplinary research.

Period: Jan 2001 – Dec 2003

Contact: H. Van Brussel, P. Valckenaers, O. Bochmann

3.5.3GROWTH Project G1RD-CT-2002-00745, MaBe: Multi-ageng Business Environments

Partners: K.U.Leuven-PMA, Profactor, Umist, Uni-Hannover, TIGA, INDRA, DHL, I-Net, INTIER, HANOMAG

Objective: The general project objective is to develop and to implement an information and communication infrastructure to establish eBusiness standards for networking enterprises, based on agent technology. MaBE will develop a multiagent business environment to enable dynamic and automated combination of multiple, complementary and alternative services between different users and providers along the whole value chain.

Period: Jun 2002 – Mai 2005

Contact: P. Valckenaers

3.5.4GROWTH Project no. G1RD-CT-2000-00298, MPA: Modular Plant Architecture

Partners: RWTH Aachen - Werkzeugmschinenlabor (D), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (I), K.U.Leuven R&D (B), Technology Transfer System Srl (I), PICANOL NV (B), Dr. Schreiter GmbH (D), Becker GmbH (D), Behr Lorraine (F), Robert Bosch GmbH (D), Robert Bosch Espana Fabrica Treto (E), Associated Contractor: Aachener Demonstrationslabor für integrierte Produktionstechnik GmbH (D).

Objective: The future competitiveness of enterprises depends considerably on their capability to react swiftly and decisively to product, process and capacity changes. It is imperative for manufacturers of high volume products with high product variety (e.g. automotive suppliers) to achieve rapid planning and implementation of production structures as well as complete production networks.

The majority of customer needs and product functions will become worldwide standardised although some local market specialisation will remain. Therefore modularised products will be produced in globally dispersed production sites with the objective being to act in an agile way to market changes. This will continue to alter the specification profiles of production structures and their planning processes, resulting in the following objectives:

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  Reduction of planning effort and time ("time-to-job one") for adaptation/re-designing of production structures.
  
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  Increased reusability and enhanced lifetime of production systems.
  
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  Technical and organisational compatibility of production facilities.
  
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  Balancing of production capacity by shifting production facilities from one site to another.
  

The standardisation and modularization of the production has to take place on different levels, e.g. production facilities, organisational and informational structures etc.

Period: Feb 2001 – Jan 2004

Contact: H. Van Brussel, P. Valckenaers, C. Zamfirescu

URL: http://www.mpa-online.net/

3.5.5IMS-NoE: Network of excellence on Intelligent Manufacturing Systems

Partners: K.U.Leuven-PMA, Politecnico di Milano, and many others

Objective: IMS-NoE is a network of excellence on IMS. See www.cordis.lu for more information on IMS under the 5^th framework of the European Commission. See www.ims.org for more information on IMS worldwide. Within this project, PMA aims to establish a web-based benchmarking service for manufacturing control systems.

Period: Jun 2003 – Mai 2005

Contact: H. Van Brussel, P. Valckenaers

3.5.6IWT Project 000318 Integrated tool selection and production planning for bent sheet metal parts

Partners: KULeuven PMA (B), KULeuven CIB (B), LVD (B)

Objective: The selection of bending tools (punch and die sets), as part of a project planning activity, can have a significant impact on the set-up time of a CNC press brake. In a production planning phase this factor should be taken into account when optimising job sequences. If fully automated tool selection can be supported, this logic can also be reversed: real time process planning would allow to determine optimal process plans for a given job sequence. Within the framework of this project automatic tool selection methods and optimisation strategies for production planning pruposes will be developed.

Period: Nov 2000 – Oct 2003

Contact: J. Duflou, D. Cattrysse, J.-P. Kruth, D. Van Oudheusden

3.5.7K.U.Leuven Concerted Research Action GOA/2001/03, AgCo2: Agents for Coordination and Control

Partners: K.U.Leuven-PMA, K.U.Leuven-DistriNet

Objective: Coordination and control is a research domain whose importance is growing continuously with the ever-increasing penetration of computers, sensors, communication and software in our society and in the artifacts we develop. Just as speech, vision and natural language, coordination and control are intrinsic to human society. Agent technology is widely considered to be a most promising candidate technology for addressing the challenges in this research domain in a generic manner.

The family of so-called “coordination and control applications” is large and diverse. Until recently, each of these applications has been researched separately, and proposed approaches present mostly ad hoc solutions. Besides this lack of cross-fertilization, the solutions suffer from severe limitations: they are static and inflexible. As a result, even minor and local changes to the environment in which a system operates require drastic changes to the system or even make it completely unusable. Moreover, these isolated application domains fail to achieve the critical mass that is required to solve coordination and control issues in a systematic and scientific manner.

The aim of this project is to use and further develop multi-agent technology to provide a context for developing dynamic and flexible systems for coordination and control. Validation of this aim in the real world is achieved by developing flexible systems in manufacturing control and network management.

Period: Jan 2001 – Dec 2005

Contact: H. Van Brussel, P. Valckenaers

URL: http:// www.AgCo2.be

3.5.8Federaal Wetenschapsbeleid Project no. EU/01/025, EUREKA/Factory3

Partners: PMA, WTCM, Belgian machine industry

Objective: Eureka is a Europe-wide network promoting collaborative market-driven research & development.

Projects in most fields of advanced civilian technology. Factory is the Eureka umbrella devoted to generating and supporting projects in the area of production. The Factory network is a flexible communication network within industry with the overall goal of helping to develop Europe’s industrial competitiveness.

The network supports European R&D projects in the following domains: 1) production methods and product design, 2) production systems and technologies, 3) organisational aspects and human resource development concerned with improvements in manufacturing and business processes.

Period: Dec 2003 – Oct 2005

Contact: H. Van Brussel, H. Vanbelle

3.5.9Flanders’ Mechatronics Technology Centre (FMTC)

Partners: A consortium of 15 Flemish machine builders

Objective: FMTC is a research center established by the Flemish government, under impulse of AGORIA, to support the Flemish mechatronics industry in their striving towards innovative products that are fit for the world market. The role of PMA in the center is to develop and safeguard the fundamental research component so as to provide the technology for the future-generation products of the member companies. PMA wants to achieve this through PhD theses on subjects that are closely related to the projects of FMTC.

Period: Oct 2003 – Sep 2008, extendable

Contact: H. Van Brussel

3.5.10Intregrated tool selection and production planning for bent sheet metal parts

Partners: IWT, LVD nv

Objective: In this project a methodology is conceived for the strategic selection of tools for bending operations. Both technological and geometrical constraints as well as efficiency related optimisation criteria are taken into account. A production planning and control system is worked out allowing the integration of process planning and production planning.

Period: Nov 2000 – Dec 2003

Contact: D. Cattrysse, J. Duflou, J.-P. Kruth, D. Van Oudheusden