How to Establish Digital Thread Using 3D Factory

Abstract In a manufacturing assembly line scenario, factory layout is one of the most crucial information used by manufacturing, facility and factory automation engineers for planning purposes. It is important for manufacturing, facility and operations team to work with most up-to-date layout when product, process and operational information on the shop-floor is constantly changing. There are four elements which governs availability of a real-time layout, these are nothing but Product Design, Manufacturing Process Planning, Layout Planning and Shop-floor. The layout must accommodate these changes coming from product design, process updates and shop-floor modifications on real-time basis so that there is no confusion amongst the stakeholders while referring layout data for their planning purpose. If we talk about the impact on the layout because of product design and process design, it is hardly managed real-time due to the isolated systems to manage these data. The integration of product, process and plant (PPP) is becoming crucial to facilitate collaboration and shrink new product introduction lead time where as real-time update from the shop-floor changes is expected in the era of digital transformation. One of the reasons why the integration of product, process and plant (PPP) does not happen is multiple isolated systems used to maintain this data, there are also challenges to feed data back from the shop-floor because of the non-availability of the thread between these objects. The paper is about how factory layout can be developed integrating product, process and plant (PPP) in a single dynamic environment and establish a digital thread between the product design, manufacturing process planning and factory layout to trigger real-time changes and facilitate digital twin of the factory. The methodology adopted here is to develop bill of material for manufacturing resources and align it with the product data management. This approach not only provides ability to maintain change control over resource objects but also helps in configuration management of the resource bill of material. The resources are grouped together as layout structure for the plant with each object required to manufacture the product. The detailed layout developed for the plant while integrating with product and process is used to establish connection with objects on the shop-floor through sensors and IOT (Internet of Things) devices to form digital twin. Such details added in layout which is So far there are no efforts to digitalize every information on the factory floor and able to generate Digital Twin of the factory by connecting physical objects with the digital objects. Paper will elaborate the approach to establish digital thread between PPP and how this can become foundation to drive digital twin of the factory.