Factory Assembly Line Simulation

[markedwards]

Hello Experts, I'm researching ways of using Labview to simulate a factory assembly line. Components move along conveyors and come together during the process as the assembly is made. I want to simulate the conveyors and movements of parts along the track to determine timing, bottlenecks and overall throughput of the system. So far I've simulated the parts using arrays, queues and simple distance over time calculations but think this problem must have come up for many before. Examples of this usage or tips on where to look greatly appreciated. I thought the DSC module might be a good start but this appears to be for the actual control rather than offline simulation... Thanks, Mark.

[Brian_T]

Medwar19,

You might want to check out the LabVIEW Control Design and Simulation Module, which allows you to design, simulate, and implement control systems with LabVIEW. 

Brian T
Applications Engineer

[markedwards]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the link however I do not plan to create dynamic models of the instruments or interfaces. I will just represent them as transport delays. My goal is to put together a simple workflow simulation that includes the rates of events on the conveyer. The difficultly is in seperating the supervisory control from the actual instruments. I want to evaluate throughput senarios by changing the amount of work put onto the conveyor and optimising the number of instruments needed to process the work.

Regards,

Mark.

[Hillary_C_E]

Hi Mark,

I haven't found any good examples. Has anyone else on the forums?