FEATURE-BASED PART VARIETY MODEL FOR RECONFIGURABLE PROCESS PLANNING

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.