Ac 2007-1539: Conceptual Design Environment for Automated Assembly Line – Framework

Automated systems play an important role in our daily life and our national economy. Educating students about how to design automated assembly systems is very important. However, education in this area most often takes place in senior design courses. This may be because of the multi-disciplinary nature of the problems and the high cost of automated equipment. In this paper, we present a prototype web-based system called the Automated Assembly Line Design (AALD) environment that allows users to rapidly create and compare conceptual designs of automated assembly line systems in a systematic way. In addition, the prototype allows instructors to post new problems and to monitor how students design assembly line systems using a mouse-tracking feature.