A Methodology Integrating Petri Nets and Knowledge-based Systems to Support Process Family Planning
Résumé
Planning production processes for product families has been well recognized as an effective means of achieving successful product family development. However, most existing approaches do not lend themselves to planning production processes with focus on the optimality of the cohort of a product family. This paper addresses process family planning for product families. In view of the advantages of Petri nets (PNs) for modeling large systems, the potential of knowledge-based systems (KBSs) for solving complex problems and the analogy in between, we develop a methodology by integrating PNs and KBSs to support process family planning. An integrated product-process family structure, called IP2S, is proposed to organize all data pertaining to a product family and the corresponding process family, thereby anchoring planning to one platform. With the IP2S, a formal PN model of process family planning is further developed by integrating the principles of several well-defined PN extensions. Thus, this paper also contributes to visualizing the dynamic behaviors and reasoning behind process family planning. The methodology is applied to process family planning for a truck family. The preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility and potential of using the methodology to support process family planning.
Domaines
Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)