PROCESS PLANNING BY RETRIEVAL AND ADAPTATION

The paper describes new developments in a feature-based process planni ng system. Extensions are discussed toward a framework where planning is accomplished via retrieving and adapting previous, part family-rela ted plans. Our primary concern here are the prerequisites to the re-us e of plans: the assessment of similarities of parts, and the matching of their feature-based descriptions. Contrary to the traditional appro aches, we define a new notion of part similarity that is based on the morphology of the precedence graphs over the parts' feature states. Pr ocedures that support the matching of features of different parts by r elying mainly on this ordering information are given, and a running ex ample explains how they actually work. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.