| Today's distributed manufacturing environment has promised that manufacturers can achieve small lots of size one while maintaining low capital investment, production cost, and inventory cost. However, issues involving communication and scheduling create problems in this environment. Hence, information infrastructure is a high priority task. Two aspects of the information infrastructure are: (1) the content-based infrastructure, and (2) the technological infrastructure, which functions as a roadway and a mechanism to transport the content. This research deals with the content-based infrastructure of a specialized manufacturing integration issue—resource independent process plans. Formal and rich product and process content as well as modular engineering knowledge pools are required for the distributed collaboration. This research aims at creating a process content of a product to facilitate the manufacturing collaboration.; In this research, a modular information infrastructure, which consists of several components, is proposed and developed for an Internet-enabled engineering integration architecture. The research focuses on defining resource independent approach for process planning and information models to represent the resource independent process plan, namely the Resource Independent Operation Summary (RIOS). In addition, the research proposes an engineering integration architecture with reusable set of software and partially implements the integration for a request for quote activity in order to demonstrate the use of RIOS.; RIOS is the first and foremost component in this information infrastructure. It consists of a resource and process requirement specification interlinked with design data to provide process model view of the product and allow for the smooth engineering integration of a sophisticated set of activities. Object-oriented data structure is used to model RIOS to facilitate its extensibility. The approaches utilized to construct a RIOS from a product design include the use of universal level knowledge, process planning task decomposition, and the alternative representation (augmented AND/OR directed graph).; The engineering integration architecture that takes RIOS as input is centered around a Resource Specific Process Planner (RSPP) module. The RSPP module, which integrates with other components in the infrastructure including the manufacturing resource model, the process knowledge model, and the manufacturing control model, takes RIOS as input to conduct engineering activity integration. This set of components serves as the resource specific pool of engineering knowledge.; The RSPP module uses a top-down search mechanism for the resource ownership hierarchy and couples it with a heuristic based conflict resolution algorithm to select machines and processes, respectively. The graph linearization methodology, which consists of pattern matching, a process economy based heuristic, and network flow algorithm, is used. The object-oriented (OO) framework has been employed throughout the research to ensure the software modularity and reusability. The OO framework includes: (1) OO information modeling, (2) OO knowledge base, (3) client-service or interface-based process knowledge, and (4) OO manufacturing resource relationship.; The work demonstrates a resource independent framework, process taxonomy, and information perspectives that allows the RIOS specification to be extensible over mechanical removal processes Implemented in this research. The RIOS framework facilitates not only the engineering aspect but also the business aspect of enterprise collaboration. A collaborative architecture has been formalized using EXPRESS for information modeling, Unified Modeling Language for software architecture, and predicate logic for knowledge modules. The resulting architecture is modular and flexible. The software written in this research is attached in the CD-ROM on the back of this th... |
