INTEGRATED KNOWLEDGE-BASED PETRI-NET INTELLIGENT FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY PLANNING

Automatic assembly planning is recognized as an important tool for red ucing manufacturing costs in concurrent product and process developmen t. A novel knowledge-based Petri net (KBPN) is defined, based on the i ncorporation of expert systems into the usual Petri nets, and used for a unified assembly knowledge representation scheme. A KBPN-approach i ntegrated with a sequence generation algorithm is proposed for the mod eling, planning, simulation, analysis and evaluation of the flexible a ssembly system (FAS). The developed KBPN-based assembly planning syste m (KAPS) can automatically adjust the deviations between the theoretic al planning parameters and the process parameters of real assembly ope rations to guarantee the best strategies and plans (sequences) for fle xible assembly. The research findings are exemplified with a simple as sembly to show the effectiveness of the method.