Doctoral Degrees (Industrial Engineering)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Industrial Engineering) by browse.metadata.advisor "Basson, Anton Herman"

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    Development of an indoor positioning system to create a digital shadow of production plant layouts
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Hermann, Julian; Von Leipzig, Konrad; Hummel, Vera; Basson, Anton Herman; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Industrial Engineering. Engineering Management (MEM).
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Plant layouts were historically considered to be very static and non-volatile structures. With the increasing influence of internal and external factors causing turbulence in enterprises, it became necessary for enterprises to be able to adapt themselves to short-term influences in order to sustain optimal operational efficiency. One possible adjustment tool for such an adaptation is the plant layout through the rearrangement of the individual facilities inside the plant. Consequently, the life cycles of plant layouts in modern industries have considerably shortened due to the impact of dynamic factors causing turbulences. However, changing the plant layout is a complex undertaking as it has a considerable effect on the underlying interconnected processes in production. As the information about the plant layout is crucial and considered as master data in production systems, it is essential that this data remains accurate and up-to-date. The objective of this dissertation is therefore to develop an indoor positioning system that allows the creation of a digital shadow of the plant layout in order to continuously represent the actual state of the physical layout in the virtual space. In order to define the requirements for such a system, potential stakeholders who could benefit from a digital shadow in the context of the plant layout were analysed. In order to generate added value for their work, the requirements were derived from their perspective. As the core of an indoor positioning system is the sensory aspect to capture the physical layout parameters, different potential technologies were compared and evaluated in terms of their suitability for this particular application. Derived from this analysis, the selected concept is based on the use of a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera in combination with fiducial markers. In order to determine specific camera parameters, a series of experiments were conducted which were necessary to develop the measurement method as well as the mathematical calculation method and coordinate transformation for the determination of poses (positions and angular orientations) of the respective facilities in the plant. In addition, an experimental validation was performed to ensure that the limit values for individual parameters determined in the requirements analysis can be met. Subsequently, the overall system was developed and implemented as a prototype. Especially the interfaces and data formats for the transfer of the collected data to typical software systems used by the stakeholders were considered. The functionality and the added value of the indoor positioning system were then validated in a case study. Thereby, the benefit of the created digital shadow of the plant layout was examined from different perspectives. The findings revealed that utilising the developed indoor positioning system for the automated capture of the plant layout and its subsequent transfer to other systems offers significant advantages in terms of accuracy and effort reduction as compared to other existing methods. This integration of the automatically updated plant layout into the production master data proved to be particularly beneficial for plant simulation, material flow analysis and route planning.