Modeling of an integrated process planning system

Abstract

The various computer-aided systems in many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) work independently at present. This leads to broken information flows and fragmentized business processes, which are the main obstacles to the improvement of business performance. Application integration promotes information sharing, streamlines business processes, and motivates internal collaboration. Moreover, the integration of standalone applications can make use of existing resources and minimize impacts on the current business practices. Therefore, it is an economical approach for SMEs to integrate standalone applications for optimized business performance. This paper presents the modeling of an integrated process planning system, which is intended to assist SMEs to achieve concurrent engineering in design, process planning and manufacturing. Firstly, the integrated system architecture is proposed by addressing the generality and reusability of functional components and collaboration support. Then, a concurrent integration model, which enables different people with different disciplines to work collaboratively, is detailed to tackle the issues of heterogeneous integration and information consistency. Finally, a process planning framework is presented, and manufacturing resource model, part information model and rulebased inference model are elaborated. The development of a prototype system is also briefly presented.