RASSP Manufacturing Interface (RASSP-MI) Appnote

The RASSP-MI is composed of several elements that implement the overall capability described. A World Wide Web (WWW) based interface provides users external to the manufacturing facility hosting the RASSP-MI with easy to use, robust access to the capabilities of the RASSP-MI. An external user will typically be a Printed Circuit Assembly (PCA) designer interested in examining the producibility characteristics of a PCA design early in the physical layout life-cycle design stage. The designer can easily and securely transmit a PCA design to the RASSP-MI, then use the Producibility Analyzer (PA) and the Rule Execution Facility (REF) to determine how compatible the PCA design is with the hosting manufacturing facility. Thus, the PCA designer can quickly and easily identify manufacturing facility-specific producibility issues with a design once preliminary component layout has occurred. By continuing to examine a design's producibility and make corrections as necessary as it matures towards completion, it is possible to eliminate all producibility issues before the design is passed on to production, and thereby achieve first-pass production success.

By making use of robust, widely-accepted standards such as EDIF 4 0 0[Lau96] and STEP AP210[ISO96], the RASSP-MI ensures that the requirements of predictability, completeness, consistency, and semantic correctness in the exchange of product data are met. In addition, the standards-based approach has made it possible to simultaneously utilize information from a variety of domains, enabling advanced producibility analyses that could not be performed previously.

The Manufacturing Resource Editor (MRE) is used by manufacturing engineers to capture the structure, characteristics, and limitations of a manufacturing facility in knowledge-base form. This information, combined with the intelligent product data acquired from the PCA designer, make the advanced producibility analysis functions performed by the PA and REF possible. The Rule Definition Facility (RDF) provides a framework within which a manufacturing engineer can capture process knowledge in the form of rules. This knowledge capture tool is designed such that computer programming skills are not required to operate it effectively, thereby making the tool accessible to a broad spectrum of manufacturing engineers, not just those with a background in computer science. The process knowledge captured with the RDF is used by the REF, which executes it much like a program on product and process data.

Finally, the RASSP-MI provides support for Mitron's CIMBridge manufacturing support software, which provides a variety of functions such as process planning and Numeric Control (NC) program generation. It also includes the Producibility Analyzer, which was commercialized by Mitron during the course of the RASSP program.

This Application Note presents further information on the operational details and benefits of the RASSP-MI components just introduced. In addition, the results achieved by an implementation of the RASSP-MI in a production environment are presented. Section 2 presents detailed operational characteristics of the various components that make up the RASSP-MI. Section 3 presents usage scenarios that illustrate how to effectively use the RASSP-MI to support common activities. Section 4 presents results achieved by a Lockheed Martin manufacturing facility using the RASSP-MI. Section 5 concludes with a summary.