Decision Making and Support Tools for Design of Machining Systems

Abstract

The design of manufacturing systems is a wide open area for development and application of decision making and decision support technologies. This domain is characterized by the necessity to combine the standard decision making methods, sophisticated operational research techniques, and some specific rules based on expert knowledge to take into account principal technological constraints and criteria. A promising trend in this area deals with the development of integrated software tools (Brown, 2004; Grieves, 2005; Stark, 2005). Their main idea consists in integrating product and manufacturing data into a common database. This enables product designers to consider the manufacturing processes constraints at the early product design stage. At the same time, all data of product design should be used directly for optimizing the corresponding manufacturing system. That is why the core of these software tools is a powerful extendable database, supported by a user friendly software environment. This database normally contains digital models of product and processes. In order to find an optimal manufacturing system configuration, a set of advanced decision making and decision support methods are used for data processing.