Research And Application Of The Intelligent NC Tool Lifecycle Management System

Numeric Control (NC) tool is an expensive consuming resource in NC processing. It has a significant influence on the flexibility and productivity of NC machine, as well as the precision and the validity of product manufacturing. However, the number of NC tool is quite large, and its components and parameters are considerable and complicated, which makes the information tracking and management quite difficult. Most manufacturing industries are trying to find an effective and reliable mechanism for NC tool management.Most NC tool management systems developed so far have just realized tool classification, tool parameters management, and basic inventory management. Other important parameters in tool lifecycle, such as tool requirement plan, on-line status, repair & scrap record, technics information, etc. have not been considered. What's more, those systems have not provided functions like tool selection & assembly, tool life prediction, etc. And there is not enough support for the integration of the Distributed Numeric Control (DNC) system.To solve these problems, an intelligent NC tool management system has been researched and developed, which could manage the tool information across its lifecycle effectively. In the beginning of this paper, based on the analysis of the tool management mechanism nowadays and its problems, requirement analysis and function modeling for the system were done using Unified Modeling Language (UML); the database of the system was designed using Power Designer; and a flexible tool coding method was proposed. Then, related technologies for system design and development were studied and the design method of the main modules was given; the artificial intelligence technologies, such as Inserting Value Forecast (IVF) algorithm, expert system, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), etc., have been applied in tool requirement plan, intelligent tool selection & assembly, and tool life prediction. The system was developed based on Browser/Server (B/S) architecture using JAVA. In the end, the application and running examples of the system were given, conclusions and summaries were made, suggestions and plans for the future work were proposed.Now, the system has been applied in Wangjiang Industry Ltd., Chongqing. In addition, it is being promoted towards more manufacturing industries.