Collaborative manufacturing process planning for distributed integration in tooling industry

Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system plays an important role in helping manufacturing companies move towards enterprise-wide automation in achieving competitive advantages. Manufacturing process planning plays a significant role by providing concurrent integration capabilities, from design to planning, scheduling and manufacturing. A concurrent manufacturing process planning architecture has been developed to support the integration of process planning with design, manufacturing, Capacity Planning and Scheduling (CPS) for tooling production. A prototype system based on this system architecture has been developed and tested in a tooling job shop, with satisfactory results.