Process Planning and Scheduling Integration in an Open Manufacturing Environment

New open manufacturing environments have been proposed aiming at realizing more flexible distributed manufacturing paradigms, which can deal with not only dynamic changes in volume and variety of products, but also changes of machining equipments, dispersals of processing locations, and also with unscheduled disruptions. This research is to develop an integrated process planning and scheduling system, which is suited to this open, dynamic,distributed manufacturing environment. Multi-agent system (MAS) approaches are used for integration of manufacturing processing planning and scheduling in an open distributed manufacturing environment, in which process planning can be adjusted dynamically and manufacturing resources can increase/decrease according to the requirements. One kind of multi-level dynamic negotiated approaches to process planning and scheduling is presented for the integration of manufacturing process planning and scheduling.