VIRTUAL TOUR

Now that we are open for business, here is a virtual tour of our facility, located in room 107 of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. We are next door to the Logistics Institute, and we occupy half of the space which was formerly the site of the old Litton Material Handling Lab. In the words of one former Tech student who attended Tech when the Material Handling Lab was here, "Wow, this place has changed a lot!"

Graduate student Joanna Shear works on a simulation model using Witness.

Graduate students "Wacky" Dave Brann and John Morris discuss the merits and implications of matroid theory as applied to improvement of throughput in manufacturing.

Dave Brann and John Morris study the kinematics of a robot using Deneb's IGRIP robotic simulation software.

Here is a virtual tour of some of the research projects that we are currently working on. At present, this page shows simulation models of various manufacturing systems.

This manufacturing cell model is developed with Deneb Robotics IGRIP package. It is a model of a demonstration facility in Georgia Tech's Intelligent Controls Lab, located in the Manufacturing Research Center. The cell features several robots, an NC lathe and an NC milling machine.

This electronics assembly line is being modeled using Deneb Robotics QUEST package for discrete-event simulation. This portion of the line features a number of parallel SMT placement machines which place components on the bottom-side of circuit cards which are used as controllers in automotive applications. A different section of the line performs top-side placement. The key issue here is to determine appropriate control policies to ensure high throughput and resource utilization for the parallel machines.

This model features a cluster tool used in fabrication of semiconductor wafers. A cluster tool has a number of modular process chambers attached to a mainframe which ensures a controlled environment for production within the tool. A robot transports individual wafers for processing at the process chambers. The research issues here are (i) how best to configure the tool with appropriate chamber types and resulting wafer routings, and (ii) how to design control policies to ensure high throughput, especially in potential deadlocking situations. The model is developed using OOSIM, an object-oriented manufacturing simulation architecture develop in C++ at Georgia Tech.