Constructing generic processes based on tree unification for process family planning

Planning process families in relation to product families has been well recognized as a promising approach to achieving production stability and efficiency, where diverse customized products are involved. As with generic products accommodating product family design, generic processes facilitate process family planning in producing the corresponding product families. In view of the fact that a production process is commonly represented as a tree, this paper puts forward an approach based on tree unification to construct generic processes from large volumes of data existing in companies´ databases. The preliminary results of applying the proposed approach to electronic products have demonstrated the feasibility and potential of constructing generic processes based on tree unification.