Motivation

Machine tool manufacturers are forced to constantly rationalize the product development process in order to reduce development time and cost to keep up with market demands. This leads to the necessity to reduce costly and time-consuming testing and optimization of physical prototypes. To reduce the time-to-market it is important to use computation and optimization tools which are capable to supply holistic models of the machine tool's structure, its control and actuation behavior and its behavior during the chipping process. All these different types of the machine's properties are constantly interacting, thus any simulation and optimization of any of these properties needs to take into account these interactions.

The currently available simulation tools, however, only allow for isolated analysis of the mechanical (topology, static, dynamic and thermal behavior), control and actuation (actuation controllers, sensors, actuators) and process (chipping simulation, chipping forces) properties. Furthermore, these simulation tools can be used in sequential order only. Therefore, optimizations are reduced to the few properties that can be modeled in the separate software tools.

→ The objective...