Publication

Abstract : System modular design is an approach being explored for the next generation of reconfigurable machines, in particular, how to use a minimum number of modules to construct different machine tools for different tasks. In this article, a grammar for the configuration machine tool design is introduced as well as discussed. Machine tool configuration is described as a hypergraph, where edges are the modules and vertices are the interfaces. The modules of the RMT are modeled as multi-point hyperedges, composite of interfaces (nodes) with valency nodes for interaction to adjacent modules and implemented with Object-Oriented (O-O) model. Simple grammars (graph re-writing rules) are written to construct and manipulate graphs for enumerating the non-isomorphic configuration of machine tools with given type and number of modules. It has been shown that the search space for the configuration design is reduced much by finding only non-isomorphic configurations.