Development of an Integrated Process Planning/Production Scheduling Shell for Agile Manufacturing

Increased reliance on agilemanufacturing techniques has created a demand for systems to solve integrated process-planning and production-scheduling problems in large-scale dynamic environments. To be effective, these systems should provide user-oriented interactive functionality for managing the various user tasks and objectives and reacting to unexpected events. This paper describes the mixed-initiative problem-solving features of IP3S, an Integrated Process-Planning/Production-Scheduling shell for agile manufacturing. IP3S is a blackboard -based system that supports the concurrent development and dynamic revision of integrated process-planning and production-scheduling solutions and the maintenance of multiple problem instances and solutions, as well as other flexible user-oriented decision-making capabilities, allowing the user to control the scope of the problem and explore alternate tradeoffs (“what-if ” scenarios) interactively. The system is scheduled for initial deployment and evaluation in a large and highly dynamic machine shop at Raytheon’s Andover manufacturing facility.