TOLERANCE ANALYSIS FOR SETUP PLANNING - A GRAPH-THEORETICAL APPROACH

Setup planning is the act of preparing detailed work instructions for setting up a part. The purpose of setting up a part is to ensure its s tability during machining and, more importantly, the precision of the machining processes. Therefore, tolerance control can be achieved prea ctively via setup planning. This fact was somewhat overlooked in the c omputer-aided process planning (CAPP) research community. While many r esearchers focused their attention on tolerance chart analysis, the is sue of tolerance analysis for setup planning was relatively unexplored . To systematically solve the setup planning problem, a graph theoreti cal approach is proposed. The design specification of a part is repres ented as a graph. The problem of identifying the optimal setup plan is transformed into a graph search problem. A setup planning algorithm f or rotational parts was then developed. The algorithm was evaluated an d found to be both efficient and effective.