A study on data handling mechanism of a distributed virtual factory

To cope with diversified consumers' needs, recent manufacturing systems are required to accommodate the agility in manufacturing by shortening the lead time, reducing the indirect costs and so on. To evaluate the performance of the total manufacturing system taking the complicated information flow as well as the material flow among areas into consideration, Distributed Virtual Factory (DVF) has been proposed. To construct DVF by integrating area level simulators, Communication, Synchronization and Data Handling Mechanism are required. The Data Handling Mechanism supplies external information required by area level simulators. In this paper, a Database Interface is developed to integrate databases into a DVF and the Data Handling Mechanism is implemented by utilizing database.