Development of design support system for pipeless batch plants

A pipeless batch plant is a batch processing production system using mobile vessels. The plant performances depend on both hardware of equipment and software of operation. So the plant includes many design factors such as number of vessels, stations and AGVs, layout of stations, vessel moving rules, job scheduling and so on. In this paper, the characteristics of pipeless batch plant design are considered to handle the problem by the systems engineering approach. Then, a practical design method known as design-by-analysis is applied to solve such a complex design problem. Based on this concept, a design support system composed of modeling, simulation and evaluation subsystems is developed. This system enables rational decision making through performance evaluation for proposed design of a pipeless batch plant. The usefulness of the system is illustrated by industrial examples.