Abstract
Process planning plays an important role of a bridge between product design and manufacturing, and computer-aided process planning (CAPP) has been discussed for a long time. Recent diversified customers' needs have driven development of agile manufacturing which can adapt to various manufacturing situations. CAPP should be also discussed from this point of view, and a set of flexible process planning methods have been proposed. Unlike conventional methods, in these methods, all feasible process plans are once generated, and then the optimal plan is searched and extracted. Therefore, it is possible to quickly re-supply a new plan which is optimal for a new situation when situation change has occurred. However, these methods involve a large computational load, since the full-search approach is taken in searching the optimal plan. This paper discusses a method for decreasing the computational load. The search process of the optimal plan is formulated as a 0-1 integer programming problem, and is solved by an existing method. Case studies proved its effectiveness.
