Integrated process design for varying products & changeable manufacturing

多变和灵活的制造和装配系统目前被认为是应对当前全球竞争加剧和动态不可预测市场的挑战的一项关键新技术。该研究项目旨在为这些先进多变的制造环境和多变的产品设计开发重要的逻辑使能，即工艺规划和调度，并通过引入新的规划方法和数学模型来扩展制造系统的知识。它针对产品/系统接口领域的三个主要领域和研究问题：1)开发一种混合工艺规划和设计方法，该方法将结合基于检索和基于产生式规划的优点以及流行的成组技术方法和产品级别的平台形成。2)开发概念上新颖的计划方法，这些方法被证明具有更好的计算复杂性，同时更适合于当今多变的制造环境。既考虑了新的数学规划方法，又考虑了非传统的优化方法。3)提出了动态柔性作业车间抢占式生产调度的新方法。4)将上游设计活动以及下游生产调度和系统重构与工艺设计和调度进行接口和集成。目标是在最先进的产品生命周期管理解决方案中进行开发和集成，最终将其转变为可用的加拿大商业现成产品。最后，还在研究与生产计划和调度的整合。 这项研究将有助于研究生和本科生的培养。预计它将对制造系统的科学和知识做出重大贡献，从而提高加拿大公司的全球竞争力。结果和应用预计将涵盖航空航天和汽车行业。

Changeable and flexible manufacturing and assembly systems are presently considered a key new technology for meeting the current challenges of increased global competition and the dynamic unpredictable markets. This research program aims at the development of important logical enablers, namely process planning and scheduling, for these advanced changeable manufacturing environments and varying product designs and extending the knowledge of manufacturing systems by introduction of novel planning methods and mathematical models. It targets three primary areas and research issues that lie at the product/system interface domain: 1) Development of a hybrid process planning and design methodology that would combine the merits of both retrieval- and generative-based planning as well as the popular Group Technology methods and platform formation at the product level. 2) Development of conceptually novel methods for planning, which are proving to be of far better computational complexity and at the same time more suitable to today's changeable manufacturing environments. Both novel mathematical programming methods and non-traditional optimization are considered. 3) Developing novel methods for preemptive production scheduling of dynamic flexible job shops. 4) Interfacing and integrating both upstream design activities as well as downstream production scheduling and system reconfiguration with process design and scheduling. Development and integration within state-of-the-art Product Lifecycle Management solutions are targeted, and eventually it turning into an available Canadian commercial off-the-shelf product. Finally, integration with production planning and scheduling is also being investigated. This research will contribute to the training of both graduate and undergraduate students. It is expected to make significant contributions to the science and knowledge of manufacturing systems, and hence the ability of Canadian companies to compete globally. Results and application are expected to cover both the aerospace and automotive industries.