An operations planner for integrated shop floor material processing and material handling operations

Planning that incorporates critical resource and part constraints due to manufacturing processing as well as material handling tolerance and kinematic requirements has not been reported in the existing literature. By integrating these manufacturing resource and part constraints using object-oriented design, our operations planner creates immediately executable manufacturing plans for flexible manufacturing systems. This planner automatically generates plans for coordinated material processing and handling activities. The effects and preconditions of actions by resources on a single part are modeled to facilitate operations planning. The operations planner uses a problem-reducing search algorithm to automatically generate alternative sequences of operations needed to complete the finished part. These alternative sequences were converted into an AND/OR operations plan graph, and results showed that for multiple robots and multiple machines, representative of resources in the PSU Computer Integrated Manufacturing laboratory, the generated operations plans were reasonable compared to human generated instruction sets. The alternative sequences in this AND/OR graph could be selected at production time to optimally satisfy specific criteria.