S. Lee et al., PROCESS PLANNING INTERFACE FOR A SHOP-FLOOR CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR COMPUTER-INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING, International Journal of Production Research, 33(9), 1995, pp. 2415-2435
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Categorie Soggetti
Engineering,"Operatione Research & Management Science
Many researchers have developed 'standard' computer-integrated manufac
turing architectures in order to reduce the cost associated with softw
are development and maintenance. Since a process plan provides the pri
ncipal input to a Shop Floor Control System (SFCS), it is necessary to
provide the process plan information in a manner suitable for use by
the SFCS. However, research in interfacing process planning with diffe
rent SFCSs has been extremely limited. The reason for this is that pro
per integration hooks and a generic vision for process plans do not ex
ist. A deterministic description of what process plans are, and how th
ey should be represented is yet to evolve. We describe an information
interface between process planning and shop floor control. The functio
nality, scope, and information content of process plans are discussed
in order to provide a clear functional distinction between process pla
nning and shop floor control. An information architecture for interfac
ing process plans and SFCSs is built. The design of the architecture i
s focused on how process plans comply with the information requirement
s of a SFCS, and how to exchange information in real-time basis. Proce
ss plans are created on a formal process plan model platform. The SFCS
architecture that is considered in this paper is a three-level hierar
chical architecture. A detailed description of functional behaviour an
d information flow for each level of hierarchical SFCS is presented al
ong with some illustrative examples.