Automated synthesis of manufacturing process plans has been attempted through many methodologies for a wide range of manufacturing problems. In some cases, such as the manufacture of machined parts, these attempts have not been fully successful: to date, it has not been possible to develop purely generative systems to synthesize complete realistic plans for a wide range of realistic machined pa...

Process planning connects product designs and the production of the designed products. It determines the production cost, quality and production cycle time. Usually one process plan is built and fixed for a unique product design before the production. However in mass customization, the possible number of unique products can be astronomical in order to satisfy diversified individual customer nee...

Considerable research and development efforts have been devoted to Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP). Nevertheless, because the CAPP problem is complex and is characterized by many interdependent technical and business parameters and variables, no viable off-the-shelf solution is yet available that can be easily or widely implemented in industry. This paper presents an overview of the CAPP...

Since there has been tremendous progress in planning in the process industry during the last 25 years, it might be worthwhile to give an overview of the current state-of-the-art of planning problems in the process industry. This is the purpose of the current contribution which has the following structure: we start with some conceptional thoughts and some comments on special features of planning...

Activity planning for missions such as the Mars Exploration Rover mission presents many technical challenges, including oversubscription, consideration of time, concurrency, resources, preferences, and uncertainty. These challenges have all been addressed by the research community to varying degrees, but significant technical hurdles still remain. In addition, the integration of these capabilit...