Modelling manufacturing systems capability

Any way of making the manufacturing industry more efficient is always of great interest due to the contribution of manufacturing to the society. A major asset within manufacturing is information about manufacturing systems, as a base when making decisions. The most essential information within manufac-turing industry would be the manufacturing systems capability information. That information would include information about the resource, used process and produced product. Although important, manufacturing systems capability models are rare, and the information seems to be challenging to model. The purpose of this thesis is to model manufacturing systems capability with focus on the machining industry. In order to model manufacturing system capability, existing information standards has been used as a frame of reference. Some information standards have been evaluated on industrial cases and sometimes modified to serve a specific purpose. The information standards have been evaluated to first separately represent product, process and resource. Thereafter have the infor-mation standards been evaluated to represent all three domains together. ISO10303-214 (AP214) has been modified and evaluated to represent any process within manufacturing. The state of the product and the state of used manufacturing system are described and connected to every relevant process step. AP214 with ISO10303-224 (AP224) has been used together with a developed method, to describe manufacturing system capability within machining. Within the limitations of AP224 geometrical feature description, the capability of a manufacturing system can be defined and connected to a product description. Using similar feature based description for the capability and the product description, products manufacturability can be evaluated. Also ISO14649 and ISO10303-238, both also known as STEP-NC, are treated in this thesis as enablers to describe manufacturing system capability. STEP-NC is shown to describe manufacturing systems within machining where the product, process and resource are collectively described. In order to describe capability and evaluate products manufacturability, STEP-NC has to be extended from describing/modelling one configuration of a manufacturing system to describe a set of configurations.QC 2010113