V. Make a short report on computer-integrated manufacturing.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 374.

Text 8b

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from Computer-integrated manufacturing

towards automatic factories

Six functional areas are now being linked to manage the flow of information throughout the factory. The areas are the design, the storage and retrieval of information about the parts being manufactured, the management and control of available resources (such as labour, machines and materials) according to changing demands, the handling of materials, the control of machine tools and other single-purpose machinery and the control of robots. By linking the six areas one can achieve what is called computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM).

Computer-aided design(CAD). Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). The very phrases conjure up tantalizing images of automatic factories turning out a lot of products at the will of one person who sits peering intently at the cathode-ray tube on his computer terminal.

Computer-aided manufacturing is not only a technical innovation; it is an organizational upheaval. CAM is fast becoming the single most promising means for a manufacturer to maintain and increase his competitive edge in the world market-place. And industry leaders foresee a continuing march towards automatic factories.

Text 8c

Look through the text and do the tasks bellow:

Tomorrow's Factory

Machining is only one part of the overall production process in the engineering workshop. There are two more basic operations: design and administration. In the engineering industry of the future, all three of these operations will be done with the help of computers, which will greatly reduce the need for labour.

There would be three main computers: one each for the flexible manufacturing system, design and administration. Instructions that enter the first computer control how and which goods are made; draughtsmen¹ work out which goods they want made with the second machine; and in the third are lodged² all the details about orders, scheduling³, the state of stocks⁴ and so on. All three computers are linked to each other, and also to an automated warehouse⁵ from which raw materials are passed by a transport mechanism to the factory floor and the machining area.

The few places where people would be involved with the factory's processes would be in the design room and in a control area where the factory's administrators sit. Draughtsmen would design products using their keyboards⁶ and screens⁷. The codes representing these parts would come along wires to the production computer which, in turn, would instruct its battery of machine tools to make the items. There would be a few "seeing" robots in the production department to make the assembly job easier. Meanwhile, the factory's administrators could keep track of⁸ the whole operation, getting information from the system by keying in instructions to their terminals.

At the heart of the factory there would be a complex communications network⁹ that links all the machines in the plant so that they constantly relay¹⁰ instructions to each other. In this way all the machines in the plant would inform each other of what is going on. The mechanisms in the plants will be linked by wires¹¹ in the same way as the telephone network connects up towns and villages, houses and offices. The main difference is that the machines will talk to each other in a binary code.

Notes:

¹draughtsman – чертёжник

²to be lodged – размещаться

³scheduling – график, планирование

⁴stock – сырьё, заготовка

⁵warehouse – склад

⁶keyboard – клавиатура

⁷screen – экран

⁸to keep track of – следить за

⁹network – сеть

¹⁰to relay – передавать

¹¹wire – провод