Planning process families with a knowledge-based system

Given the finite manufacturing resources available on a shop floor, process family planning has been well recognized as an effective means of achieving product family production efficiency. In view of the fundamental issues in process family planning and the potential of knowledge-based systems (KBSs) in solving complex problems, in this paper, we put forward a prototypical KBS to support process family planning by automatically generating production processes. The XML-based knowledge representation is adopted to alleviate the difficulties in modeling complex product and process family data and planning knowledge. To cope with constraint handling, a mechanism is designed to facilitate the generation of production rules, which model various planning constraints. Planning production processes for a truck family is used to demonstrate the potential of the prototypical KBS.