Implementation of Collaborative Process Planning System

To ensure competitiveness in today’s market, process planning should be collaboratively performed in manufacturing enterprises. Since process planning is a huge and complex job, several designers should process planning together. Designers consult with one another regarding the results through continuous communication and collaboration. In this research, key technologies are studied according to requirements analysis on collaborative process planning system. The flow is described based on the characters of collaborative process planning. The structure of this system is built and the system is implemented to save the cost and improve the reliability of process planning.

Implementation of Synchronous Mechanism in Collaborative Process Planning

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has been considered as a promising approach for developing process planning systems and optimizing process plans. Process planning based on CSCW is inevitable for reducing manufacturing preparation time and costs through concurrent and collaborative engineering. Since process planning is a huge and complex job, several process planners should execute planning together. Therefore, information exchange in collaborative process planning is very frequent and the synchronization for each user has a decisive influence in collaborative process planning system. In this research, expression of process documents based on XML is studied and the method that process documents are mapped into XML documents is described. Implementation of synchronous mechanism is presented to develop the system of collaborative process planning.

Flow-Oriented Collaborative Process Planning System

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has been considered as a promising approach for developing process planning systems and optimizing process plans. Process planning plays an important role in the computer integrated manufacturing environment. Process planning based on CSCW is inevitable for reducing manufacturing preparation time and costs through concurrent and collaborative engineering. In this research, two key technologies of data exchange method and data communication method are studied based on the analysis of structure and business flow for collaborative process planning. The collaborative process planning system has been developed and adopted to support collaboratively work.

GSPN-Based Modeling of Virtual Teams Building in Collaborative Process Planning

Virtual teams have been adopted by organizations to gain competitive advantages in this global economy. It was extremely important of modeling for virtual teams building in collaborative process planning. Based on the flow analysis of virtual teams building in collaborative process planning, the relationship of actual virtual teams building and the elements of GSPN were studied. Finally, the modeling method generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPN) - based was proposed and the model can excellently describe the flow of virtual teams building in collaborative process planning.