Methodology for Capability Profiling of Manufacturing Equipment

For the purpose of facilitating collaboration among manufacturing applications, we propose a methodology for capability profiling of the manufacturing equipment. This methodology describes the process planning information required for the efficient use of 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. 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 methodology provides a method for defining the range of the product specifications which can be manufactured by flexible manufacturing system (FMS).