A PARAMETRIC MANUFACTURING KNOWLEGE REPRESENTATION MODEL FOR AGILE MANUFACTURING EXECUTION CONTROL

Manufacturing paradigm has shifted gradually from "mass production" to "mass customization" with the required capability of quick response. Suppliers have to produce products with wide variety of configurations and at the same time manufacture them agilely. The traditional approach cannot represent product and manufacturing knowledge properly for products with wide variations and cannot support manufacturing agility effectively. In this paper, a parametric manufacturing knowledge representation model was proposed to address the issue of product configuration variation and manufacturing agility and to facilitate agile manufacturing execution control. The models proposed, in addition to the VPC model proposed previously, include GAMM and GAMP for the modeling of manufacturing facility and process, respectively. The concepts of manufacturing capability for facility and process, as well as the mechanism for matching them, were also introduced into the proposed model. With these models, the knowledge of manufacturing facility and process for products with wide variations can be concisely represented for agile manufacturing execution control.