production lines
Sequence of standardised workstations connected by conveyor technology
Connecting conveyor technology
The conveyor or transfer technology in production lines ensures that materials and components are transferred between stations in a synchronised or asynchronous manner. In principle, any technology can be used here, such as roller conveyors, power-and-free, EHB or AGVs, or even a combination of all of these. WinMOD-SIMLINE offers a tailor-made library of 3D elements and virtual drives for each of these conveyor systems. These can be combined with each other so that a complete virtual material flow can be simulated.
Components and materials are integrated directly as CAD imports or selected from our 3D component libraries. Virtual commissioning (VC) then makes it possible to simulate large conveyor systems with many parts in real time in order to calculate cycle times and throughput, perform line balancing (bottleneck management) or determine buffer dimensions and changeover times.
Assemble, process, test
The actual assembly, processing and testing processes take place at the stations. It is often the case that stations have their own control systems, which may come from a wide variety of manufacturers. Flexibility is therefore a crucial criterion for a VC system. With WinMOD, you can easily and efficiently connect multiple and different control systems via different bus systems to your system at the same time.
Depending on the desired simulation depth, the CAD data of the stations can be integrated to simulate manufacturing and testing processes in 3D in real time. If the focus is more on the entire plant, it makes sense to create the stations as black box units that output type Z components after a defined processing time X. This simplified behaviour can also be simulated in WinMOD-SIMLINE, in which case it is not necessary to integrate a control system.
