Process Sequencing Problem in Distributed Manufacturing Process Planning

Abstract

Process Sequencing, a subtask of generative process planning, involves the task of selecting the best process plan, which can minimize the time and cost of manufacturing a part, subassembly or assembly, out of a set of alternative process plans. A network can represent a set of alternative process plans where nodes of the network represent machining processes, connected by precedence relationships. This chapter begins by introducing different strategies of generating the process planning network, respecting various manufacturing constraints. Next, we describe various graph search methods based on space search techniques, in order to find the best planning route in the process planning network. We also present a novel transformation from process sequencing problem to Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem. We end this chapter with some experimental results on network size and computation time along with performance analysis of different optimal process sequence search algorithms described in this chapter.