PLANNING FOR THE MANUFACTURE OF AXISYMMETRICAL PARTS - AN AI-BASED APPROACH

Process planning is an important stage in the manufacturing process be cause it bridges the gap between design and manufacture. Automation of this crucial activity will yield significant benefits in the efficien cy, consistency and economy of manufacture. In this paper, an AI-based approach to the automation of process planning is described. It explo res the potential for generating efficient plans for machining operati ons by making use of techniques from AI research. Currently, the syste m is capable of generating process plans for rotational parts. We plan to extend it to examine 21/2-D and 3-D machining of prismatic parts f or generality. The planner selects processes and tools and generates a complete operation sequence. Detailed schemes for feature-based part representation and tool description enable us to include relative tole rance information, which is a distinguishing characteristic of this sy stem. The plan synthesized by the system can be further processed to g enerate NC code. The system described in this paper is characterized b y the following: Use of a feature-based representation system. Accessi bility to ICES format input commercial CAD systems. Complete tool desc ription scheme for checking geometric consistency during tool selectio n. Adoption of the hierarchical planning approach and utilizing the no nlinear planning algorithm in implementation.