Concurrent intelligent design and assembly planning (CIDAP): object-oriented intelligent Petri nets (OOIPNs) approach

The paper introduces the research efforts of an ongoing project in intelligent product process design. A new unified class of Petri nets called OOIPNs (object oriented intelligent Petri nets) is defined based on the basic place transition Petri nets, hybrid intelligent systems (HIS), distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) and object oriented approach, and used for the representation and integration of distributed knowledge sources. An application framework which uses the OOIPNs approach has been developed for the concurrent intelligent design and assembly planning. With this framework, a unified, knowledge and computation based integrated intelligent system for the modelling of product design and its assembling processes, especially the hybrid and dynamic knowledge exchange among intelligent agents can be achieved. Thus, product design and assembly planning can be carried out simultaneously and intelligently in an entirely computer aided concurrent design environment