Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

This paper proposes an approach employing Case-based Reasoning (CBR) techniques for collaborative authoring of business process models by a geographically dispersed team. The approach enables co-ordination of dynamic workflows of the virtual enterprise team. The paper describes an enterprise collaborative portal architecture combining collaboration, graphical process modelling and CBR tools and presents a case study illustrating the proposed approach.

The design of optimum gripping systems for robotic assembly tasks is non-trivial. Traditionally, production engineers have been in charge of this task. Their involvement, however, should be minimised in a modern computercontrolled manufacturing environment. This paper presents a fully automated gripper design system. The system receives the CAD models of the components to be assembled, identifies their geometric structures, determines their dimensions, groups them in families and then generates the best gripping system capable of handling them during the assembly. The paper also gives an example of the application of the system to a simple gripper design problem.