Web-DPP: towards job-shop machining process planning and monitoring

Outsourcing, joint ventures and cross-border collaborations have led to job environments geographically distributed. Targeting the distributed environment, the web has been widely used for developing collaborative applications due to its platform, network and operating system transparency and easy-to-use interface. Utilising the existing infrastructure, the objective of this research is to develop an integrated Web-based Distributed Process Planning (Web-DPP) system for job-shop machining operations and execution monitoring. Our approach engages a dispersed working group in a collaborative environment, allowing team members to share real-time information through the Web-DPP. This paper presents both the system design specification and the latest development. [Received 18 February 2010; Revised 24 July 2010; Accepted 10 November 2010]