PROCESS PLANNING INTERFACE FOR A SHOP-FLOOR CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR COMPUTER-INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING

Many researchers have developed 'standard' computer-integrated manufacturing architectures in order to reduce the cost associated with software development and maintenance. Since a process plan provides the principal input to a Shop Floor Control System (SFCS), it is necessary to provide the process plan information in a manner suitable for use by the SFCS. However, research in interfacing process planning with different SFCSs has been extremely limited. The reason for this is that proper integration hooks and a generic vision for process plans do not exist. A deterministic description of what process plans are, and how they should be represented is yet to evolve. We describe an information interface between process planning and shop floor control. The functionality, scope, and information content of process plans are discussed in order to provide a clear functional distinction between process planning and shop floor control. An information architecture for interfacing process plans and SFCSs is built. The design of the architecture is focused on how process plans comply with the information requirements of a SFCS, and how to exchange information in real-time basis. Process plans are created on a formal process plan model platform. The SFCS architecture that is considered in this paper is a three-level hierarchical architecture. A detailed description of functional behaviour and information flow for each level of hierarchical SFCS is presented along with some illustrative examples.