Process Planning and Scheduling for Distributed Manufacturing

Abstract

New architectures of manufacturing systems have been proposed aiming at realising more flexible control structures of manufacturing systems, which can cope with dynamic changes in volume and variety of products, and also with unscheduled disruptions. The objective of the research is to develop an integrated process planning and scheduling system, which is applicable to the holonic manufacturing systems (HMS). A basic architecture for the HMS is proposed to determine both suitable sequences of the machining equipment needed to manufacture the products and suitable production schedules for the machining equipment. In particular, procedures are developed to generate suitable production schedules and to modify the process plans based on the scheduling results.