Towards Sequence Planning Based on Configurable Product and Manufacturing System Platforms

Operation sequences are central in the interaction between product and manufacturing development. This is because the sequences create an understanding of how a product is manufactured. The high degree of complexity in managing and planning manufacturing operations during the development of a configurable product and manufacturing platform requires a new and more flexible sequence planning approach. By integrating configurable product and manufacturing system platform descriptions, product variance, manufacturing system flexibility, and product and manufacturing system complexity can all be efficiently adapted to each other by considering interrelated constraints. Such an integrated platform system also provides the information required to describe the operations needed to manufacture an instantiated product variant. This paper proposes an approach in which sequences are viewed based on the relations among self-contained operations, thus saving engineers from manually constructing sequences for each product variant. The sequences of operations related to, for example, the part flow for a specific platform configuration, robot operations or operator tasks can be automatically visualized through the use of different perspectives