An efficient information system for automated process planning

Process planning is one of the most important components in manufacturing Industry. It may be considered as a bridge between design and manufacturing. Tremendous efforts have been made to develop automated process planning systems during the last three decades. However, their effectiveness is still far from satisfactory. Process planning is a very complicated and complex task. It not only requires a good deal of technique specific expertise and knowledge but also is very dependent on dynamic manufacturing resources. With the recent development in computer information systems, especially Artificial Intelligence (Al) and advanced modelling techniques, Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) has greatly benefited from the new information processing capabilities. By efficiently combining some of these techniques such as object-oriented techniques, deductive mechanisms, logic programming and fuzzy logic, an integrated and intelligent information representation is introduced to facilitate automatic process planning in this paper. It can effectively satisfy the requirements of representing the process planning information and also provide an open structure for the information exchange within the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) environment.