Functional Requirements of a Model for Kitting Plans

摘要

Industrial assembly of manufactured products is often performed by first bringing parts together in a kit and then moving the kit to the assembly area where the parts are used to assemble products. Kitting, the process of building kits, has not yet been automated in many industries where automation may be feasible. Consequently, the cost of building kits is higher than it could be. We are addressing this problem by building models of the knowledge that will be required to operate an automated kitting workstation. A first pass has been made at modeling non-executable information about a kitting workstation that will be needed, such as information about a robot, parts, kit designs, grippers, etc. A model (or models) of executable plans for building kits is also needed. The plans will be used by execution systems that control robots and other mechanical devices to build kits. The first steps in building a kitting plan model are to determine what the functional requirements are and what model constructs are needed to enable meeting those requirements. This paper discusses those issues.