AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROCESS PLANS FROM SOLID GEOMETRIC MODELING REPRESENTATION (FEATURE, RECOGNITION, CAD/CAM)

Scope and Method of Study. Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems promise to significantly increase productivity in industry. Several computer-aided design (CAD) systems and computer-aided process planning (CAPP) systems have been developed and implemented in the laboratory and in industry. However, if an integrated manufacturing system is to be developed, integration of both CAD and CAPP is necessary.;Findings and Conclusions. A prototype automated process planning system FREXPP is developed. This system can identify the form features of a part from the boundary representation of a solid geometrical modeler and automatically generates a process plan. The automation of feature recognition from the solid modeling representation eliminates most of the manual input required by current computer-aided process planning systems. Process plans are generated using the expert system methodology. An additional advantage of this approach is that it should be easy to transplant this system to different companies because the expert system will permit process planners to modify the manufacturing decision logic contained in the system. This system is a major step toward integrated computer-aided manufacturing.;This research presents an automated process planning system that extracts the form features of a part that are represented by a solid modeling system; afterwhich, this system automatically generates a process plan using an expert system.