ABSTRACT
Process planning was traditionally considered as manufacturing preparation that provides manufacturing methods and operation instructions. The process planning has become an important part in computer integrated manufacturing environment. To increase flexibility in a production life cycle, process planning has to play a significant role by dealing with dynamic activities and time-dependent problems from product design to shop floor manufacturing. The approaches to process planning actually refers to the approaches to the design of computer aided process planning systems. Generally there are two conventional approaches, the variant approach and the generative approach. The nature of process planning can be generally described as knowledge-intensive. The knowledge involved is mostly subjective, nondeterministic, nonheuristic, and difficult to represent. Process planning is time-dependent and dynamic. The planning functions being capable of dealing with dynamic changes in manufacturing processes and manufacturing requirements have far-fetching importance in modern manufacturing environment.
