Manufacturing responsiveness through integrated process planning and scheduling

This paper describes a novel approach to improve manufacturing responsiveness, defined as the ability of a manufacturing system to make a rapid and balanced response to the predictable and unpredictable changes characterizing today's manufacturing environments. The approach aims at creating a dynamic environment that is capable of reacting to factory conditions and which has a significant impact on the reduction of cost, lead time and inventory. The concurrent engineering concept of information sharing to support all the product development phases is employed here. Techniques such as design for manufacture have been applied to the design-process planning interface. Efforts have been made towards eliminating the divisions between process and scheduling activities using the concept of resource elements, which are the exclusive and shared capability boundaries between processing elements in the manufacturing facility. A prototype integration system has been implemented consisting of a knowledge base with facility modelling functions, an intelligent feature-based design system, a featurebased process planning system and a simulation-based scheduling module.