Abstract:
Process planning is a complex and knowledge intensive task; it transforms design
information into manufacturing processes and find out the optimal sequence of operations. As a
connecting bridge between product design and production, manufacturing process planning plays
a key role in maintaining high levels of responsiveness and adaptability for manufacturing system
while propagating variety from product to process. The benefits from product family design
cannot be guaranteed if there is no appropriate process planning methods transforming
efficiently product variants into manufacturing process variants which realize them.
Methods of conventional process planning like variant process planning based on group
technology, generative process planning based on artificial intelligence, non-linear process
planning and adaptive process planning, mainly focus on the process plans generation for one
individual product/part. These either pre-planning or re-planning methods have obvious
disadvantages.
This research intends to focus on studying methodology, architecture and proper
models for Reconfigurable Process Plans, by means of which the process plans for any part variant
in a part family can be flexibly and automatically generated.
