A Web-based service for distributed process planning optimization

The advance and pervasive applications of the Web-enabled computations are exerting a profound influence on product design and manufacturing processes, and one of the major technical shifts for product development systems is toward supporting distributed collaboration. A key component for this trend is to develop a service model that enables product development systems to be triggered and manipulated from a remote computer, so as to provide a more flexible manner to share and interoperate the executive codes and processing data. In this paper, a process planning optimization module has been wrapped as a Web-enabled service and deployed in the Internet to support distributed design and manufacturing analysis. The module consists of several optimization approaches, and a Tabu search-based approach, which can optimize the selection of machining resources, determination of set-up plans and sequencing of machining operations to achieve optimal process plans, is elaborated to illustrate the process. The Web-based service has been integrated with a distributed feature-based design system, and the latter can generate design models and re-represent them in an XML representation based on VRML and attributes of features to provide the input of the former. Through effective utilization of the Web and Java technologies, the established service and relevant system can be used by a distributed design team to organize concurrent engineering activities effectively.