Product and manufacturing capability modelling in an integrated CAD/process planning environment

Computer-aided process planning (CAPP) is one of the key components in computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) environment. Fully automatic CAPP systems require information transfer between CAD/CAM systems to be mutual, dynamic, concurrent, automatic and efficient. The difficulty in achieving this is the management of the vast amount of heterogeneous data, knowledge and complicated inference processes encountered in developing automatic planning systems. The objective of the reported research is to develop a framework for modelling and managing engineering product and manufacturing capability information in an integrated feature-based CAD/knowledge-based process planning environment. The feature-based design system is developed with a commercial boundary representation (Brep) solid modeller with additional feature-modelling functions. The process planning system is developed using a knowledge-based system, which is fully integrated with the design system through an information mapping mechanism. Process planning decisions are made by searching for a match between the product requirements and the process capability of available manufacturing systems. This is achieved by invoking the rules coded in an inferencing mechanism (an inference engine). Both the underlying methodologies and the implementation aspects will be addressed in this paper.