Process Planning in Manufacturing E-Marketplaces – The Process Planner Agent

Resources capabilities and availabilities analysis plays a key role in decision mak-ing problem related both to Production System Configuration and Re-configuration. Moreover, in real production environments, interaction between different class of resources used in the shop floor (handling devices, machines, tools, fixtures, etc.) may cause a lot of problems as regards modeling, analyzing and evaluating performances of different production system configurations. A key factor for assessing performances connected to a production system configuration concerns with the process planning. In this study some comprehensive procedures for managing the setup planning, pallet configuration and setup sequencing activities have been developed in order to mapping process plan on a production system. This last task, namely “Mapping Requirement on Device”, aims to map products on production devices (machines, fixtures and pallets) and concurrently production devices each on other so that, at the end of the mapping procedure, a set of pallet based workplans can be generated. In fact, “setup planning procedure” aims to generate suitable setups for the workpieces to be machined, “pallet configuration procedure” works in order to combine the different setups (pertaining to such a workpiece) onto the several fixtures devices, and finally “setup sequencing procedure” aims to generate pallets’ sequences (according to the overall technological requirements) which carry the workpieces clamped with different setups. In the following sections a comprehensive example has been illustrated to demonstrate the proposed mapping procedures.