Process plan feasibility: Accounting for interactions between planning decisions
Abstract
A process plan for machining is a description of a sequence of operations that produce a designed part using the available machines, fixtures, and tools. The objective of this work is to clarify the nature of the process planning problem, and to develop an integrated planning system that can assess plan feasibility while accounting for the interactions between planning decisions. Solving the automated planning problem depends on understanding what decisions must be made and whether the resulting plan is feasible. The focus on interactions stems from the fact that interacting decisions, made in isolation, and then combined, are likely to result in an infeasible plan. For example, the feature definition decision interacts with the tool selection decision; the feasibility of either decision cannot be fully assessed until the choice made for the other decision is known. An integrated planning system is built to support decision making and feasibility assessment while accounting for the interactions between decisions. An object-oriented implementation illustrates the approach. Plan feasibility can be assessed at any time during planning, and specific constraint violations are identified. The planning model can be easily attached to an automated planning algorithm and thereby provide an essential component of problem solving: assessing the feasibility of the decisions made by the planner.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Chang, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Industrial engineering|Mechanical engineering
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