Computer Integrated Manufacturing Laboratory

The Laboratory does research and development of software for industrial automation, interactive multimedia, verification of enterprise control.

Description

The laboratory was formed based on the former CIM Department in 1990 during the structural reorganization of the institute. The laboratory has employed in average 4-7 researchers and 2-3 PhD students in the past ten years. Based on our topics and on the interest of our researchers we have several years of successful R&D co-operation with Hungarian (e.g. Technical University of Budapest and Miskolc University) and foreign universities and research institutes, as in Korea, Japan, Mexico, Italy, Germany, etc. Until the nineties we had joint works mostly with big national enterprises, as IKARUS, GANZ-MAVAG, VILATI, etc. In the past years our co-operation is directed mostly towards joint European projects which means first of all universities, research institutes and industrial SMEs. According to recent demands we work together with more and more SMEs in Hungary, too. In financing our activities we use not only research funds and EU funds but national R&D resources as well, and new industrial partners are targeted, too, as the Nuclear Power Plant in Paks. We increase our presence and weight by activities in the recent national Széchenyi Plan, too. In 2001 we were involved in two winning projects (Film-saver and Digital Factory)

In our research and development we not only keep the "traditional" design and control tasks of manufacturing automation, however we turn towards intelligent manufacturing applications, virtual/extended enterprises and www network applications. Handling together in an integrated way the management, design and operation of manufacturing systems is in the focus now. Our results are published in journals and in big conferences of important international organizations, as IFAC, IFIP, IEEE, etc. Our researchers are active in the work of these (and several other international and national) organizations.

We continue our research in the topics of design, simulation, scheduling, real-time control, evaluation and quality control of flexible manufacturing cells (FMC) and systems (FMS). Some of our projects were finished successfully in the past 2-3 years (e.g. Paks, OSACA, PLENT, FLUENT, EPSYLON), some projects are closed to be successful (as WHALES) and some national (Film-saver, Digital factory) and international projects (as BIDMED, REDEST, XPERTS and Akita) were started recently.

Some basic, joint characteristic of our R&D projects:

• Object-oriented design methodologies and software reuse were applied in CORBA environment for the modeling and simulation system and in the CNC control system for the OSACA EU project. We keep going ahead in using the G2 intelligent environment and the Java language.

• Virtual enterprises are typical in the EU projects PLENT, FLUENT and WHALES. In PLENT the extended enterprise is a set of co-operating SMEs, controlled by three main software modules, which are the following: co-operation module, evaluation module, workflow based local control module. The FLUENT project deals with flow-oriented control of supply chain management of supplier-customer-enterprise networks. The EPSYLON project gives solutions for process modeling and evaluation of lean manufacturing, assembly, disassembly, maintenance and recycling.

• Application of interactive multimedia in the research and in the two Széchenyi projects (Digital Factory, Film-saver).

• In the EU 5^th Framework project WHALES the goal is the web-based management of complex, high volume, expensive projects of big, powerful, distributed, complex enterprises. The REDEST project deals with management of requirement gathering and analysis, while the BIDMED project solves the computer assisted management of co-operative bidding in the medical sector. In our XPERTS EU project we have a chance to deal with intelligent/knowledge based machine tool design.

• In the EU networks ICIMS-NOE, AMETMAS-NOE, SIM-SERV and NEURON we work together with 30-40 EU research and industrial firms in different fields of robotics, simulation and virtual/real enterprises, their design and management

• In our project with the Paks Nuclear Power Plant (Hungary) the knowledge server technology was used to assist the substation operators and engineers by designing and implementing a multi-function DSS system.

Four researchers of the laboratory are teachers at the new, external Integrated Information Technology in Mechanical Engineering Department at the Technical University of Budapest (BME), and we teach there 2-3 new subjects. We have active relationships with several other universities, too – we teach, give exams, refer masters’ and PhD works at the BME, Miskolc University, Budapest Polytechnic and Denise Gábor Technical Highschool.

Beyond the traditional good foreign university connections (as Patras, Genova, München, Stuttgart, etc.) we have working contacts running the joint projects with several SMEs in Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc.