FBD: A Function Block Designer for Distributed and Collaborative Process Planning

The objective of this research is to develop methodologies and framework for distributed and collaborative process planning. Facilitated by a real-time monitoring system, the proposed methodologies can also be applied to integrate with functions of dynamic scheduling in a distributed environment. A function block enabled collaborative process planning approach is proposed to handle dynamic changes during process plan generation and execution. This chapter focuses on collaborative process planning, particularly on the development of a function block designer. As function blocks can sense environmental changes in a shop floor, it is expected that a so generated process plan can adapt itself to the shop floor environment with dynamically optimized solutions for plan execution and process monitoring.