Research And Development Of The Auto Shop Tool Management System

Computer Integrated Manufacturing System (CIMS) is the direction of automated production in every enterprise. The most remarkable character of it is integration, not only of the material flow, but also of the information flow. Tool management system (TMS) is a significant part of CIMS. As an auxiliary meansfor machining center, TMS is one of the important manufacturing recourses for an enterprise.Tool and its data selection in designing the process file for a machining is highly skilled job. Thus an information system integrating different kinds of tool information is indispensable.This paper studies as well as analyses comprehensively hardware configuration and function realization of TMS, putting special emphasis upon several key technologies, that's control strategy, database structure, tool optimization and so on. The TMS is been developed, and the following are the main achievements of the article.1) Transformation of cutting tool system from entitative model to relational model. The database should conform to the normal forms requirements and special demands of users. As a unified data source, database contains all the date information of the system.2) Integration of relational database and object-oriented design by using Active Data Objects (ADO). ADO is a high-level interface suitable for all kinds of database, facilitating the manipulating and migrating of various forms of database systems developed by Object-oriented Design (OOD) methods.3) A new tool allocation strategy integrates Group Technology, Genetic Algorithms and virtual tool matrix strategy, it can solve the problem about tool allocation optimize well in FMS.4) Integrating multiple programming techniques in a system, we can design useful functions and users-friendly interfaces. This is implemented as follows: tool database navigation, common database editing interface and immediate displaying of information storing.