Process Planner’s Assistant : An Interactive and Iterative Approach to Automating

Most existing approaches to computer aided process planning aim for full automation by searching for a plan that is optimal with respect to a pre-speci ed objective function. Such full automation is often infeasible in practice for three reasons: (i) the search space of potential plans is huge, (ii) optimality metrics are often context sensitive and can only be elicited through user interaction, (iii) because of the importance of process planning, organizations are more interested in process planning assistants that support human expert process planners rather than standalone process planners. In this paper, we present a \process planner's assistant", which helps the human process planning experts in coming up with process plans. In order to achieve this, the process planner's assistant must have access to the full search space of process plans, and the ability to modify plans in response to human criticism. The former is provided by basing our system on ASU Features Testbed, a comprehensive and systematic framework for recognizing and reasoning with features in machinable parts. To support the latter, the system is equipped with an incremental and interactive search mechanism. We will discuss the operational details of the resultant system, called ASUPPA. 1 corresponding author