A contribution for integrating the operational safety concept in CIM

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
An automated manufacturing system embodies a combination of hybrid technologies whose performances keep improving. The design of such a system should respect the extremely severe production constraints (including quality and dependability) and necessitates the application of powerful model-based tools now commonly used in CIM approaches. The notion of service delivered by the elements of the system is quite important in those approaches. If one of the production elements cannot deliver its specified service or delivers it in an inappropriate manner, production flow disorganization or even accidents might result. Therefore in critical situations it becomes necessary to implement recovery procedures in order to ensure the safety of operators and, by extension, of tools and products without affecting the performance of the manufacturing system. This paper presents a functional approach to integrate the concept of operational safety during the specification phase of automated manufacturing systems. This approach takes various factors into account such as human operators, production tools and production flow. The objective is to assist the designer in elaborating functional specifications using operational safety data. The approach proposed is defined from a system standpoint and consists in establishing a misfunctional simulation model used to analyse the flow sensitivity and the production function criticality in the case of failures. As an application example, a misfunctional study of a robotized welding cell is given to illustrate the approach.

This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit: