A Multiagent Architecture for Concurrent Design, Process Planning, Routing, and Scheduling

A concurrent engineering system has been developed using a multiagent architecture to address the issues of design, manufactur ability analysis, incremental process planning, dynamic routing, and scheduling simultaneously The system includes a feature-based intelligent design subsystem for prismatic components, a shop-floor subsystem to represent available resources, and a supervisory control interface to manage the shop-floor resources The evaluation of the system used a simulated shop-floor environment with four production machines for the design of a prismatic component. As the design progressed, manufacturability was evaluated and shop-floor planning was carried out concur rently Valid process plans, routing, and scheduling were generated The system is now being extended to incorporate additional design systems and shop-floor environments

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