Autonomous Assembly Process Planning According to the Production Line Configuration

Abstract

In this study, a virtual production line is used to present a method for generating assembly process-relational plans for a product according to the configurations of the production line and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. In an autonomous production system, process-relational plans are generated dynamically by agents based on process-relation graphs. Usually, such process-relation graphs are not determined uniquely and often have some degrees of freedom. Therefore, more practical and efficient assembly process-relational plans would be obtained if process-relation graphs were rewritten according to changes in the configurations of actual production lines. In the proposed method, process-relation graphs are rewritten dynamically by agents using two simple rewriting rules. The results from simulations on a virtual assembly line provided that the progress of the assembly job differs with the quantities of invested jobs and machine layouts. Accordingly, the simulation results prove the usefulness of rewriting process-relation graphs according to the configurations of actual shop floors.