AI approach on preliminary process planning

摘要

The concurrent engineering recently is an integrated approach of the product development cycle, which integrates all elements of the product lifecycle from concept though disposal. The manufacturing process planning has an essential role in thisprocess.Our research field is related to the conceptual level of process planning, which called preliminary planning. Because of the special characteristics of tasks of this planning stage, it seemed to be expedient to apply methods of artificial intelligence.The facilities of the case-based reasoning (CBR), artificial neural networks (ANN), rule-based expert system and genetic algorithm (GA) were studied. Several preliminary planning stages require a draft process plan. We developed a case-based planningsystem, where the indexing was helped by an index graph, the similarity of cases was estimated by an artificial neural network, and the adaptation of a case is helped by a plan editor, a rule-based system and genetic algorithm.