Interactive Process Planning in the AMRF

System Interfaces Under Development There are currently three major subsystems under development, the interface to a CAD/ Solid modeling system, the data administration system (DAS) and the work order management system. All of these interfaces will be used to obtain information about the parts to be produced. The solid modeling interface will serve as a tool to get information about the part geometries to be produced including the dimensional and tolerancing information. It will also be useful for the process engineer to verify the changes to the part geometry, and to do high level interference checking against fixture, and other forbidden volumes. The interface to the DAS will be used to store process plans and to search for process plans within the DAS. It will also be used by the planning system to obtain information about the production capacity of the entire facility (obtain tooling reports, etc.). The interface to the work order management system will provide a tool by the facility level system to give planning jobs to the process planning system and for the planning system to report back on the status of process plans. Future Work and Conclusions This first implementation of the planning system has provided quite a learning experience for the staff of the process planning project. The use of Flavors, the lisp machine, development of a file exchange specification, and prototype expert planning systems has given insight into a number of strengths and weaknesses of our current approach. These lessons have pointed out a number of areas that need work in future implementations. A more robust internal representation is needed to allow multiple relationships to exists between work elements in the precedence graph. We have been exploring using commercially available expert system shells such as Knowledge Craft, or KEE. These tools would provide some form of portability across a variety of computer systems. A second major thrust is to design the planning system to be more closely tied in with control systems, so that the planning module gives tasks to a controller while exploring possible alternative paths. A final area of major interest is the development of expert planning modules. Currently we are testing a interface to SIPS [17] for the work of transforming features to process steps. We have been enhancing the knowledge base to reflect the process capabilities of the AMRF, and are using the system as a learning tool for the …