Recent Advances and Future Challenges in Automated Manufacturing Planning

The effective planning of a product’s manufacture is critical to both its cost and delivery time. Recognition of this importance has motivated over 30 years of research into auto-mated planning systems and generated a large literature covering many different manufac-turing technologies. But complete automation has proved difficult in most manufacturing domains. However, as manufacturing hardware has evolved to become more automated and computer aided design software has been developed to support the creation of complex geometries; planning the physical fabrication of a virtual model is still a task that occupies thousands of engineers around the world, every day. We intend for this paper to be useful to newcomers in this field, who are interested in placing the current state-of-the-art in con-text and identifying open research problems across a range of manufacturing processes. This paper discusses the capabilities, limitations and challenges of automated planning for four manufacturing technologies: machining, sheet metal bending, injection molding, and mechanical assembly. Rather than presenting an exhaustive survey of research in these areas, we focus on identifying the characteristics of the planning task in different domains, current research directions, and open problems in each area. Our key observations are a