A conceptual design for an automated design to process planning system

In this research, a conceptual design methodology for automated process planning was developed. The design methodology involved integration of computer-aided process planning (CAPP) with computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) based on an object-oriented design approach. The current development of such a large software system as a process planning system is expensive, and is difficult to completely automate. To attack the problem, a process planning concept was built upon the software-IC (reusable software module) concept; this provided extensibility, portability, and compatibility of the system.;Current CAD/CAM systems do not assist the designer in evaluating the part for its manufacturability nor do they give any guidance to the manufacturing engineer in creating a process plan. This research addressed the task of helping the designer to create a manufacturable part with given manufacturing resources by developing an expert system to automatically evaluate the manufacturability of a product.;The concept of this research was tested with a prototype system in the Macintosh-II environment. Allegro Common Lisp and Flavors package were used to manipulate the complex CAD data, and the Nexpert-object expert system shell was used for process planning and manufacturability evaluation.;Finally, this research pulled together many materials from the past related research for designing CAPP integration with CAD/CAM. This research shows how to integrate CAPP with CAD/CAM. Although the total integration of automated process planning with CAD/CAM is currently not implementable from a real-world point of view, the simple prototype given in this research suggested that the CAPP integration with CAD/CAM was feasible.;The complete development of an automated process planning system is not achievable without extensive product requirements data and manufacturing systems data. Therefore, the product data model was designed such that it could provide the suitable input-data for a process planning system. A product was defined based on features. The feature information was then defined in terms of the geometry, topology, and technological data in the form of an object-oriented representation.