Process Configuration for Multiple-Variant Products (Diss.)

Researchers: 

K. Schierholt

Financed by: -

Motivation:

The number of variants of a specific product is on a steady rise. Product configuration applications are employed to manage this product variety by defining one generic model for a family of products and deriving a product variant from that model only when needed. With each new product variant, a new manufacturing process plan has to be developed as well. Knowledge-based systems are often used to perform this process planning task.
The scientific objective of the dissertation project is demonstrating the sufficiency of general configuration techniques for configuring certain kinds of process plans. This requires that:

A form for representing process planning knowledge can be found that is suited for the application in a process configuration task. 
Process planning knowledge can be separated into different categories of knowledge with possibly different forms of knowledge representation in each category. 
All different categories of process planning knowledge can be merged into one comprehensive process configuration model for algorithmically solving the process planning task. 
Results:
This dissertation develops a framework model for process configuration that uses product configuration principles to solve the process planning task. The model builds upon the structural similarity of process plans within one product family. Process configuration knowledge is modeled using plan skeletons which are defined as graphs using a visual language. The visualization of process plan structures, which itself implicitly describes general sequencing knowledge, and the distinction among different knowledge categories play a key role in simplifying knowledge description and maintenance.