Method to Automatically Create an Initial Layout for a Production System

Abstract

A well-proven means to automate processes are industrial robots. Nevertheless, there are still many processes that are not automated, especially in small and medium sized companies. A main reason is a missing automatism to create suitable solutions. To meet this challenge, the ROBOTOP research project tries to find a list of appropriate components and arrange them in a suitable layout. This paper addresses the second step and an algorithm is described that generates a suitable layout. Thereby, a main aim is to generate a layout that is plausible to the user. The problem relates to the facility layout problem and the proposed algorithm is also applicable to non-robotic related tasks. However, current methods do not yield to an appropriate, because due to the simplifications of the used models a manual effort is required when transforming the model to a 3D scene. The algorithms accepts a description of the process and identifies different kind of patterns. For each kind of pattern, layout rules are defined. With this, the model can be transformed to a plausible 3D setup.