An Integrated Process Planning Production Scheduling Shell For Agile Manufacturing

Abstract: "Increased reliance on agile manufacturing techniques has created a demand for systems to solve integrated process-planning and production-scheduling problems in large-scale dynamic environments. To be effective, these systems should provide user-oriented interactive functionality for managing the various user tasks and objectives and reacting to unexpected events. This paper describes the mixed-initiative problem-solving features of IP3S, an Integrated Process-Planning / Production-Scheduling shell for agile manufacturing. IP3S is a blackboard- based system that supports the concurrent development and dynamic revision of integrated process-planning and production-scheduling solutions and the maintenance of multiple problem instances and solutions, as well as other flexible user-oriented decision-making capabilities, allowing the user to control the scope of the problem and explore alternate tradeoffs ('what- if' scenarios) interactively. The system is scheduled for initial deployment and evaluation in a large and highly dynamic machine shop at Raytheon's Andover manufacturing facility."