Process Planning in Manufacturing E-Marketplaces

Abstract

This chapter discusses in detail the Process Planner Agent (PPA), one of the agents of the VMS, presented in Chapter 2. Within the proposed distributed architecture, the PPA allows the process planning activity to be performed through a direct communication between the customer and the supplier systems. The communication protocol is based on a JAVA® routine starting a CAD on-line applet, which puts the customer in condition to directly translate his/her technological requirements into data which are easy to be managed by the Virtual Manufacturing System (VMS). The PPA receives the data from the CAD on-line and elaborates them to select a set of alternative manufacturing sequences. In this chapter the architecture of the CAD on-line applet is presented together with the PPA. Within the Virtual Manufacturing System (VMS), the PPA has a front-end role: in fact, it aims at analyzing the technological requirements, expressed by the customer through the CAD on-line, and translating them into a set of data representing the set of alternative manufacturing sequences, which can be utilized by the downstream agents to formulate the counter-proposal. In particular, the output of the PPA activities is a database of technological alternative sequences, which depend on a Part Design and Data file, provided by the CAD on-line JAVA® routine; the database of technological alternative sequences is transmitted to the downstream Manufacturing Planner Agent, which utilizes these data to perform its activities.