Abstract: Typical process is a sample process which can reflect processes of a group of similar parts. As a kind of process knowledge it can be referred to for the process planning of new parts. In this paper a methodology of typical process discovery for body-in-white (BIW) parts, based on the distance (i.e. dissimilarity) between processes, is proposed. The process for BIW part is divided into assembly positioning, joining, and quality inspection operations, in accordance with the typical assembly; the assembly oriented typical process is extracted based on these three operations. The distances of assembly positioning, joining, and quality inspection are calculated respectively using different measuring methods. The distance between processes is calculated as the sum of the assembly positioning, joining, and quality inspection distances. Furthermore, the clustering algorithm is applied to form the process clusters according to the distances between processes. The mean variances of the distance between processes in the cluster are calculated. The process with the minimum mean variance in the cluster is selected as the typical process. Finally, a case study is used to show the procedure of the typical processes acquisition for BIW and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
