Situational planning of production processes in a flexible automated production system

The introduction of flexible automated production systems (GAPS) that reduce the number of machine tool workers and the product fabrication time also necessitates fundamentally new approaches to production process planning. A proposed situational planning system (SIP) that takes full advantage of the capabilities of GAPS is analyzed. The SIP system is a component of the automated control system for the GAPS, which in turn is subordinate to an integrated automated planning design and production engineering system. Depending on the production situation, requests are fed to the SIP system from the automated production process control system. Data on the production situation are also supplied simultaneously to the SIP system along with the request. Only the production limitations are fed into the SIP system, i.e., to the automated control system for the GAPS, where these limitations include production process limitations as well as the organizational limitations. Information on the fabrication routing and the composition of the operations is generated by the SIP system, i.e., by the automated control system for the GAPS itself in real time. Thus, both the routing and composition of an operation become flexible, while the control systems for the GAPS system becomes more intelligent.