An Opportunistic Approach to Process Planning within a Concurrent Engineering Environment
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Traditionally, design and manufacturing activities have been serially linked by the process planning function. One objective of concurrent engineering is to transform this sequential approach into a more interactive, parallel process. To support concurrent engineering, computer-aided process planning (CAPP) systems must be developed that supports an opportunistic style of process planning. This paper presents XTURN, a CAPP system implemented within the IDEEA environment that Supports a flexible and opportunistic style of process planning. XTURN enables engineers to explore alternative process plans in early design stages. The engineer controls process selection strategies, while XTURN determines the interactions between the various choices, flags those that arc inconsistent, and offers advice on resolving any inconsistencies. XTURN does not require that an inconsistency be immediately removed, rather it remembers the inconsisitency and allows the engineer to continue exploration. This paper describes he development and application of XTURN and IDEEA. Also, ongoing research that extends IDEEA into a fully distributed system integration workbench to support concurrent engineering is discussed. 1993 CIRP.
