PROCESS PLANNING INTERFACE FOR A SHOP-FLOOR CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR COMPUTER-INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING

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.