Manufacturing process planning is a difficult problem with a prohibitively large search space. It is normally tackled by decomposing goal objects into features, and then sequencing features to obtain a plan. This paper investigates an alternative approach. The capabilities of a manufacturing process are represented by a formal language of shape, in which sentences correspond to manufacturable objects. The language is interpreted to describe process plans corresponding to the shape generation, complete with cost estimates. A macro layer that describes single operations of the machine is implemented on top of the formal language. The space it describes is searched by the generative simulated annealing algorithm, a stochastic search technique based on simulated annealing. Plans that are close to the optimum are generated in reasonable time.
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Brown et al. (1997) studied this question.