Proposal of Manufacturing Equipment Capability Profiling and its Case Study

For realization of collaboration among manufacturing applications, we propose a method for capability profiling of the manufacturing equipment in order to describe the process planning information efficiently required by manufacturing applications. We can describe the capability of the manufacturing equipment by applying the application integration framework (ISO15745) to a manufacturing information model we proposed in this method. As a case study, we show the validity of this proposal for the process planning of the washer machining cell. We extend the OASIS PPS (Production Planning and Scheduling), and add a description method to express constraints required by capability description. It describes capability profile data in XML. This proposal provides the definition method of the range of the product specification which can be manufactured by flexible manufacturing system (FMS).