Abstract
Manufacturing stands at the basis of European economy and welfare. The uttermost challenge of manufacturing processes facing global competitors is to improve the quality, reduce the delivery time and decrease the cost. Thus, the need for investing in research and development in the domain of manufacturing became mandatory for the European industry and community. The newest trend for optimizing the manufacturing processes is to introduce virtual manufacturing systems for simulating these processes. Simulations are able to cover all production chains and they facilitate detecting eventual problems at early stages, saving a lot of time, effort and costs compared to real industrial production systems. The areas of high-interest in the research topic of virtual manufacturing and digital factories are closely related to the planning phases of a digital factory. The life cycle of a factory follows a series of stages and phases from the initial concept of the factory to the ecological dismantling. To deliver the required products to the customer and in the same time to face the competitors, several planning functionalities have to be performed for the factory to be ramped-up, monitored and maintained. In order to cover one or more of the factory planning phases, we are designing and developing several functional modules, this way providing exploitable results for some existing industrial enterprises. We established the dissemination, exploitation and validation strategies from the beginning of the planning process of the modules, based on international standards and on advanced modelling/verification techniques. The functional modules are integrated with other existing virtual fabrication systems having well-established data feeding and data extraction mechanisms. The modules address methodologies and tools for agile factory layout configuration and optimization, as well as functionalities for the rapid design and development of reliable automation and control systems. The developed functional modules, thus, are some tools for cost-effective and rapid creation, management and use of complex knowledge-based factories.