Flexible process planning for autonomous machining systems

Autonomous distributed machining system (ADMS) is considered as the one of the next generation manufacturing systems. From the intelligent and distributed data processing among the work part and facilities in the factory, jobs of the work part (machining features) can be optimally assigned to many available machining cells. Since each cell has it own facilities and abilities for machining the work part, the same job of the work part can be executed by different cells according to the change of their process or operation plans with the new configuration of machining features. The flexibility of ADMS in determining the optimal process and operation plans for the work part, therefore, will be decreased by using the input data such as the present machining features that their configurations are fixed. The concept of using IC card as the work part data manager, and the extraction of machining features with their possible reconfigurated forms as the input data for the ADMS are proposed to solve this bottleneck of the system