Virtual Factory as a Method of Foundry Design and Production Management

The paper outlines the methodology of virtual design of a foundry plant as a system. The most important stage in the procedure involvesthe development of a model defined as a set of data about the system. Model development involves two stages: defining the model’sarchitecture and specifying the model data in the form of parameters and input-output relationships. The structure is understood asconfiguration of machines and transport units, representing the sub-systems and system components. As the main purpose of thesimulation procedure is to find the characteristics of the system’s behaviour, the merits of the iterative method involving analysis,synthesis and evaluation of results are fully explored.