Concepts for Integrating Process Planning and Production Scheduling

Integration between different phases of the production process is one of today’s key issues in manufacturing. This is so for process planning and shop floor control as well. Process planning creates work instructions to manufacture a part and shop floor control schedules and executes these instructions to get the final products on time and with reasonable cost. However, process planning inevitably imposes constraints on the utilization of machining resources. In particular, the routing of the parts and the necessary machining times on the various resources is primarily determined by the process plans attached to them. These constraints are due to the decisions concerning the kinds of processes that should be carried out in an appropriate order to produce a part, which satisfies the original specification.