A Study on the Virtual Automotive Plant for a Virtual Manufacturing

가상생산기술 적용을 위한 자동차 가상플랜트 구축에 관한 연구

Nowadays, one of the major technical issues in manufacturing is how to implement an virtual plant as an well-designed, integrated environment for sharing information and engineering collaboration among diverse engineering activities. The systematic approaches to make a virtual plant based on a 3-dimensional CAD, cell and line simulation, database and internet technologies are proposed in this paper. To do that, measuring and 3D CAD modeling technologies of many equipments, facilities and structures of the building are developed, effective management of information including models and related files in WWW environment is implemented, and precise simulations of unit cell and whole structured plant are performed. For the beginning of implementing a Virtual Automotive Plant, the Virtual Plant for the Body Shop of a Korean automotive company is constructed and implemented. Using this Virtual Plant, shorten car development time and cost saving are possible.