Co-Design of Structural Timber Components through Automated Model Generation for Manufacturing Simulation of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Manufacturing of products with high variability and small batch sizes, such as prefabricated timber building components, presents significant manufacturing challenges. In urban areas, the construction industry's relatively low productivity, coupled with rising demand for affordable housing and irregularly shaped spaces, calls for novel and innovative construction technologies. The method of computational design shows promise as a solution, allowing unique, optimized structures composed of individual components, departing from conventional modular construction. Automated prefabrication of these building components enhances construction productivity. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems offer a practical solution for addressing building component variations and changing project requirements, requiring frequent system reconfiguration. The co-design process concurrently optimizes building components and manufacturing systems to ensure manufacturability and structural optimization through iterative design, validated by simulation. However, manual simulation implementation and validation for component manufacturability is time-consuming and error-prone, especially considering the numerous iterations and layout variants involved in the co-design process. This paper proposes a method for automatically generating and conducting simulations to check the manufacturability of building elements to enable co-design. The proposed method uses AutomationML as a modeling language for describing the manufacturing system and building components. We conduct several simulations with parametrically generated timber shell elements to validate the proposed method.