Balasubramanian, SundarOne of the important activities in process planning is the design of fixtures to position, locate and secure the workpiece during operations such as machining, assembly and inspection. The proposed approach for variant fixture planning is an essential part of a hybrid process planning methodology.<p>The aim is to retrieve, for a new product design, a useful fixture from a given set of existing designs and their fixtures. Thus, the variant approach exploits this existing knowledge. <p>However, since calculating each fixture's feasibility and then determining the necessary modifications for infeasible fixtures would require too much effort, the approach searches quickly for the most promising fixtures based on a surrogate design similarity measure. Then, it evaluates the definitive usefulness metric for those promising fixtures and identifies the best one for the new design.en-USneural networkscomputer integrated manufacturing CIMflexible manufacturingmanufacturingvariant fixture planningdesign similaritySystems Integration MethodologyThesis