DIGITIZATION IN PROJECT PLANNING AND EXECUTION : FFG
Digitization in the planning and manufacture of production facilities is already being actively and successfully applied at MAG IAS GmbH. In addition to the clear advantages for project management and the activation of previously unused potential in plant operation, quality and costs of the produced component can be improved in the "Digital Factory". With these performance parameters, digitization in production will become firmly established as a disruptive development step and faster than expected.
As a system supplier, MAG IAS GmbH plans, builds and installs production systems for the volume production of components, primarily for the automotive industry. Today, these systems consist of high-performance CNC machines that operate in parallel for the quantities to be machined within a production section (manufacturing cell). Since an agile manufacturing system (Figure 1) usually produces several component variants in parallel (batch size 1), MAG started the "Digitization/Expert System" project as early as the late 1990s. This project uses commercially available software and own databases with empirical values, at that time software products from Tecnomatix (today SIEMENS). The planning process and tools used can be divided into 4 clusters.
Digital machine planning right from the start
Today, workpiece data is available from all well-known customers as 3D models. In the comparison between raw part and finished part, the transformation is defined for each individual feature (Feature Recognition, Figure 2), the appropriate analogy process is determined from the experience database and the parameters are adapted to the current geometry (rule-based planning). If the analogy process is missing, feature processing is done manually. In this first stage, the process detailing (Process Detailing & Manufacturing Planning), the workpiece analysis, process definition and the selection of the suitable cutting machine are carried out. The SIEMENS products NX CAD, NX CAM and NX MLP (Machining Line Planner) are used for this. In the case of multi-stage machining processes, the individual machine groups can be filled up taking into account the logical machining sequence at the feature (currently still under development in the NX MLP version). After defining the appropriate processing machine, the NC programs for the individual process steps/machine groups are generated fully automatically.