Opportunistic Process Planning: A Knowledge Based Technique for CAPP Applications

Feature based Computer Automated Process Planning applications often suffer from exponential growth of the search space and thus CPU-time, with increasing complexity of a part. Opportunistic process planning can remedy this drawback. The approach consists of dividing the features into two sets : one set, called the important features, are used to generate a process plan; the other features, called non-important features, are added to the process plan afterwards. This generation method resembles much the reasoning pattern of a human process planner. The developments are carried out in the framework of the ongoing Esprit project 6805 COMPLAN. Other reasoning methods, used in the project and described in this paper, are : combined variant/generative planning, non linear process plans, Petri nets, and feature based reasoning.