Integrated manufacturing process planning and control based on intelligent agents and multi-dimension features

Dynamic manufacturing environments require a flexible process planning and control system in response to changing manufacturing resource availability, production uncertainty, and dynamic machining conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel integrated process planning and control method based on intelligent software agents and multi-dimension manufacturing features. An integration framework with three modules including generic process planning, shop floor process planning, and online process control is developed. An intelligent agent-based approach is adopted for achieving intelligence and autonomy of individual software modules and components. An ontology-based multi-dimension manufacturing feature model is proposed to facilitate the communication and collaboration between process planning and control, as well as to speed up the decision-making of intelligent agents. The feasibility and flexibility of the proposed method are validated through a proof-of-concept implementation.