Agile Cable Production Service Project
home page
Agile Cable Production Service (ACaPS) Project ABSTRACT
Warning: the ACaPS project is an on-going experimental project, and the
Web pages and software associated with it have a tendancy to change. The
project participants will try to keep everything current and synchronized,
but no guarantees of accuracy, completeness, or anything else are stated,
implied, or should be inferred.
Outline
Click
here to go directly to the Agile Cable Production Service.
The goal of this project is to explore Agile Manufacturing with
negotiation over the Internet. The project has focused on the cable
manufacturing domain and will take advantage of an existing cable
harness production facility at the
Lockheed Missiles and Space
Company in Sunnyvale, CA. An experimental software architecture
is being developed to support the negotiation process over the Internet.
This architecture uses the World-Wide Web as the medium of exchange,
and Mosaic as the user interface.
This collaborative effort will build
on the concepts of the
Next-Link project at
Stanford University's
Center for Design
Research, and
apply the software tools now under development at Lockheed's
Artificial
Intelligence Center and Lockheed Advanced Manufacturing
Technology group. Sandia National
Laboratories will provide expertise from a customer perspective
in the domain of cable design and manufacture.
The capabilties of the cable harness fabrication facility at Lockheed
Missiles and Space Company are available as a
cable production service. Information about this service is
available to customers in the form of web pages, including a collection
of forms that the customer completes and submits to request quotes for
services. Various means are supported for the communication of
actual design information, including email, FTP, and FAX. Design
infomation may be in the form of screen images or CAD data conforming
to standard formats (eg IGES, STEP, etc.)
ACaPS is a loosely structured project, and includes a collection of ad hoc
meetings (minutes
are available) and a series of
exercises, the first of which occurred in August, '94. The work is
on-going, and includes the following tasks:
- characterize cable fabrication capabilities
- develop protocol for transacting business over Internet
- develop software architecture to support such "e-commerce"
-
post cable production service on Internet
- develop acceptance and verification protocol
- make on-line production status information available
- define product delivery and verification procedure
- perform experiments to validate
approach, and post lessons learned
Lockheed hopes to apply the outcome of this experiment to its other
facilities, progressively expanding its network of agile facilities for
both internal and external customers. For a detailed account of a
foundation of ACaPS project, see the AIMS paper,
published in Defense Manufacturing Conference '93.
Development:
- Cable fabrication capabilities of the LMSC cable production
facilities characterized, and turned into a "Cost, Capability, and
Availability" (CCA) document.
- A business protocol for electronic negotiation developed.
- Web pages describing ACaPS, both the project and the production
service (the CCA document), posted to the World-Wide Web. Included are
forms for requesting services. These forms reflect the protocol for
negotiation.
- An initial software architecture to allow customers to
request quotes for services, and to request the services themselves,
developed and installed. The architecture uses Mosaic as a user
interface. The initial system does not address security or data
representation concerns.
- Standard information representations for the domain of cable design
are being explored. An EXPRESS model has been developed, and will be
used to describe the cable design information in future exercises. The
ACaPS team hopes to coordinate its efforts to standardize these representations
with ISO 10303 - the "Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data" (STEP).
It is hoped that a synergy will develop between the ACaPS team, the STEP
development community, and other relevent industry members, resulting in
a robust standard representation.
The ACaPS project is engaging in an open-ended series of exercises. The
results of these exercises are available as on-line demos.
- Exercise 1 - This first exercise
was the initial test of both
the electronic negotiation system and of the agile production capabilities
of the Lockheed cable shop. Sandia Livermore played the role of the
customer. All activity was monitored in real-time by all the project
participants, and email dialogs documented the observations.
The ACaPS project represents a
collaborative effort involving participants from
There is a
mailing list.
The following are pointers to other activities of significance
relative to the ACaPS project.
There is also a
Lockheed ACaPS home page.
If you have any questions or comments, press this button:
_____________________________________________________________________
Hisup Park
Mark R.
Cutkosky
Lane Wimberley
Lockheed AI Center
wimber@aic.lockheed.com