An intelligent system of setup planning on Internet for metal cutting

This paper presents an intelligent system to automate the task of setup planning in the Internet environment. The requirements of a setup planning system are discussed and how the proposed system meets the requirements is also described. In developing the system organization, WWW technology, including the XML markup language and Java programming language is utilized. By that, the seamless integration of setup planning system with other manufacturing systems is realized. Furthermore, a multi-objective optimization approach based on fuzzy set theory for setup planning is introduced. In this approach, the setup planning problem is decomposed into three subtasks, namely the setup generation, operation sequence and setup sequence. A combination of fuzzy evaluation and Hopfield neural networks based algorithm are adopted to execute these subtasks. Finally, we provide an illustrative example regarding the usage of the proposed system.