A web based manufacturability agent framework for an E-manufacturing system

E-manufacturing enables manufactures to share manufacturing resources hence increasing machine utilization, manufacturing capabilities and capacities. In the paper a manufacturability agent for an E-manufacturing system is proposed. A multi-mode part classification coding system developed from the Opitz coding system is used to create virtual manufacturing clusters using a two step methodology to group the parts and machines. Parts are grouped according to the form code using the similarity coefficients-based method (SCM) and then grouped according to manufacturing process sequence, batch size and processing times using Levenshtein distance measure. Decision criteria for machine selection Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) is then given.