IMS Gnosis

Knowledge Systematization for Configuration Management: Process Configuration for Multiple-Variant Products

Researchers:

Partners:

Alusuisse Technology& Management Ltd., EPF Lausanne (Prof. B. Faltings), Centro CIM della, Svizzera Italiana

Financed by:

CTI 3528. 1

Motivation:

GNOSIS is an international project within the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems initiative, the first worldwide initiative for coordinating and supporting research in manufacturing systems between industrial and academic partners. GNOSIS aims to develop a post mass production paradigm to cope with changing demands on manufacturing companies through a better and more intensive use of information and knowledge in so-called soft products. Such soft products can be customer products, production tools, or production systems as a whole. Soft in this context denotes products that are intelligent, re-configurable, ecologically sound, and reusable. GNOSIS was funded by the CTI as an IMS Test Case from 1993 to 1994 and was initiated as a full IMS project in 1995. Under the GNOSIS umbrella many regional projects are running, which are funded through regional funding agencies. One of these regional projects was initiated in the region of Switzerland in 1997.

The objectives of the project are:

The project focuses on the configuration of processes in sheet metal and coil material production, one-of-a-kind products of multiple-variant product families. The well-known problem of product configuration is in this project further confounded by time dimension and order constraints between operations that cannot be solved through standard product configuration techniques. The goal is to test and evaluate advanced techniques in knowledge-based reasoning for the task of operations planning and to demonstrate their workings through the development of a prototype.

The following activities are in progress:

The project was completed in fall 2000 with the developed prototype being implemented successfully in one Alusuisse manufacturing plant where it is operationally used since November. Process planners are well satisfied with the result and acknowledge an eased knowledge maintenance of the process configuration knowledge using the developed plan skeleton editor.

The following activities have been completed:

During the first year of the project, the focus was placed on problem analysis. Knowledge representation evaluations and prototype definitions were the central aspects of work in 1998. The results of the problem analysis showed that the technical aspects of operations planning and the finding of an effective knowledge representation are of high importance. However, other aspects, such as the flexibility given by the tool to the user, the knowledge maintenance aspects connected to a given knowledge structure, and the transparency of decisions made by the system, have a higher relevance to acceptance and overall performance. Different concepts for enhancing the operations planning process in the areas mentioned were developed and discussed intensively in user workshops. The workshop results led to a prototype definition for a graphical process plan editor that also will be used during the planning process. This prototype was developed and integrated with the legacy systems in 1999 and spring 2000.