Study on process planning system for holonic manufacturing (3rd report, process planning considering machining schedules)

New architectures of manufacturing systems have been proposed aiming at realizing more flexible control structures of manufacturing systems which can cope with dynamic changes in volume and variety of products. They are so called as holonic manufacturing systems, autonomous distributed manufacturing systems, random manufacturing systems and biological manufacturing systems. The objective of the present research is to develop an integrated process planning and scheduling system which is applicable to the holonic manufacturing systems. In the previous paper, a systematic method is proposed to select suitable sequences of machining equipment, by applying the genetic algorithm (GA) and the dynamic programming (DP) methods. The method is extended, in the present paper, to consider the production schedules of the machining equipment.