A new teaching approach exploiting lab-scale models of manufacturing systems for simulation classes

ABSTRACT

Teaching in higher education is often challenging for the lack of practical implementation and difficulties in student involvement. In engineering classes, students are often deeply involved in computer laboratories and projects in which they are challenged with decision-making problems. The lack of the real system that is being modelled may hinder the effectiveness of the teaching activities. In this paper, we propose a new teaching approach based on the student’s interaction with lab-scale models of manufacturing systems. Students have the possibility to make observations, collect data, and implement improvements to a system, all within a course duration. The flexibility of the proposed approach enables its application to a wide range of courses, for instance manufacturing system engineering, production management, Industry 4.0. As case study, we target a course on simulation of manufacturing systems for industrial and mechanical engineering, in which students are asked to build, validate, and use a discrete event simulation model of a production system. The application of this project methodology changed the way of teaching simulation in the course and significantly improved students’ evaluation and satisfaction.

KEYWORDS:

• manufacturing systems
• discrete event simulation
• learning factory
• learning-by-play
• LEGO

Acknowledgments

The research has been partially funded by Sme.UP Group. The authors also thank the Italian LEGO Users Group (ItLUG) for their contribution in physical model building.

Attachments

The instructions to build a two-station lab-scale manufacturing system with LEGO and the python code to be used on a simple station are available in the following repository:

github.com/giovannilugaresi/lab_scale_manufacturing_systems.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://www.ev3dev.org/ (Accessed on 24-08-

2. https://tinyurl.com/polimi-ims (Accessed on 24-08-2022)..

1. LEGO and LEGO MINDSTORMS are trademarks of the LEGO Group. ©2022 The LEGO Group®.

2. The choice of python as programming language is not restrictive and the proposed architecture can be extended to other languages.

3. The basic python code of a station is available in the following repository: github.com/giovannilugaresi/lab_scale_manufacturing_systems.