Application of digital environments for learning factories: digital learning factories, review and discussion

Abstract: Learning factory is a modern key approach toward educating future production engineers. Learning factories (as physical production facilities) aim to provide a holistic view of the product life cycle through the different stages of supply chain for their learners and enable them to put their theoretical production background into practice and optimize the processes. This thesis was inspired by the efforts of XPRES lab at the production engineering department, KTH, which is one of the developers of digital factory and digital manufacturing models and performs a number of research studies regarding the integration of the physical and digital environments. The digital environments are now one of the competitive factors for the success of industries all over the world. However the usage of digital environments has not been studied from the learning point of view for learning factories, as it is a new concept. The goal of this thesis is to introduce, discuss and review the benefits of such digital environments for learning factories from the learning point of view. This work also considers a case study at CiP (Center of industrial Productivity) which is a learning factory located at TU Darmstadt, Germany. The goal of considering this case study is to demonstrate these benefits for CiP by developing two different digital models. Also, a number of references mainly regarding virtual learning environments are studied and analyzed. To develop the digital models, the production system of CiP is required to be analyzed. This task has been accomplished by development of a discrete event simulation for CiP in the Extendsim software. The development process of such discrete event simulation required collection of all the production data, process and parameters from CiP. The simulation model is verified theoretically. In particular, the assembly stations are selected for the development of the 3-dimensional dynamic demo which can visualize the assembly process. This 3D demo is then developed in the Tecnomatix Process Simulate software by Siemens. Besides the simulation models, the following studies are performed: (i) the benefits of the digital learning factories have been studied and discussed; moreover, (ii) a comparison of digital learning factories and the traditional learning factories (which is called physical learning factories in this work) is accomplished in five different categories: investment, study scenario definition, study process, study result, and learner’s experience. Even though digital learning factories provide numerous advantages for learning purposes, they cannot yet enable perfect learning of a number of subjects that require physical interaction such as teamwork, working with machines, etc. The essence of physical experience as one of the goals of learning factories gives rise to the fact that at least with current digital technologies, the digital learning factory cannot replace physical learning factories, even though they have a lot of advantages. However, according to the results of this work, learning factories are highly encouraged to utilize digital environments (i.e. digital learning factories) as supplementary tools for improving the learning experience as well as speeding up the learning process.