Development of a Function Block Designer for Collaborative Process Planning

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