Object-based process planning in automatic manufacturing environments

At the very abstract level, generative process planning is like any other planning problem. An analogy can be drawn between the process planning problem and the robot planning problem. At the top there are a set of goals to be achieved and a set of operations available, and the computer is asked to, starting from scratch, synthesize a sequence of operations to achieve the given set of goals. It can be shown that conjunctive goal planning problems in general are very diffcult to solve. One remedy that has been proposed to solve the robot programming problem, and apparently could be applied to the process planning problem, is to provide the users with very high level programming languages such that details to achieve a high level operation can be transparent to the users. In other words, the computer is used to fill in low-level details. Another possible remedy would be to generalize the family concept such that families can be defined precisely enough to eliminate human modification and broad enough to include most variations. In this paper we purpose the framework of object-oriented knowledge base to achieve these functions.