Integration of process planning and job shop scheduling for dynamic and adaptive manufacturing control

The concept and prototypical implementation of a flexibly integrated production planning and scheduling system called FIPS (flexible integration of production system) is described. It consists of three major parts: a feature-recognizing system (FREDOS) that evaluates the 3-D-BREP (boundary representation) geometrical description of a part in terms of generic features that correspond to the execution of a basic manufacturing operation; a static process planning system (SSM) that identifies all combinations of manufacturing resources that are suited to produce the part; and a dynamic resource-allocation system (DRS) that decides online which of the possible resources has to be used in order to execute a manufacturing order. The assignment strategies may be individually specified by the application using the specification language SORC. A description is given of the basic ideas behind these systems along with a short overview of their implementation.<
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