We believe that, in most cases, a generative planner is a better approach for creating a preliminary process plan. This research is developing a new hybrid approach that uses a successful generative process planning approach and adds a variant fixture planning approach. The fixture planning approach must identify designs and process plans that have fixtures that can hold the new design. We have developed an approach for defining a usefulness measure that explicitly reflects fixture usefulness. A specific example shows how one can use this approach to measure the usefulness of setups.
Many manufacturers now realize that time is a critical and valuable commodity.
This manufacturing cycle time has many components, including move, queue, setup, and processing times. Much effort is spent to reduce manufacturing cycle time by improving manufacturing planning and control systems and developing more sophisticated scheduling procedures, and these efforts have shown success. However, it is clear that the product design, which requires a specific set of manufacturing operations, has a huge impact on the manufacturing cycle time. Product development teams need methods that can estimate the manufacturing cycle time of a given product design. Thus, the product development team should include this activity in their concurrent engineering approach as they address other life cycle concerns, including testing, service, and disposal.