Abstract
In this paper, we describe our development of a fully integrated manufacturing planning assistant (IMPA) system, which is able to: (1) interpret the finished part requirements directly from the designer's CAD systems or solid modelers without user intervention or special feature coding; (2) check the machinability of a designed part; (3) automatically generate a process plan, a tool path and an NC (numerically controlled) code, and (4) support interactive user modification of the resulting plans, tool paths and NC code. A demonstration version of the system was designed to provide automated assistance for the planning of machining processes on three-axes NC machine tools. The underlying architectural concepts and reasoning algorithms can be extended to more complex machines such as four-or-more-axes NC machines. CAD, CAE, and CAM including robotic, FMS (flexible manufacturing system) and NC machines are widely used in industry today. There is increasing interest in automation of factory control software Merchant, (1988); this includes automating the generation of the control programs — that is, in developing systems which will automatically produce the NC code for machining the part, given a model of the part, the shape of the raw material, and the machine specifications. With such systems, there are several difficulties in the manual preparation of an NC program code such as, long and tedious calculations, high risk of error in data preparation, etc., which need to be eliminated. This is a critical step toward the integration of CAD and CAM into a truly concurrent engineering and manufacturing environment.
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Mayer, R.J., Su, CJ. & Keen, A.K. An integrated manufacturing planning assistant — IMPA. J Intell Manuf 3, 109–122 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01474750
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01474750