Integrated and concurrent approach for compound sheet metal cutting and punching

In sheet metal processing and manufacturing, there are a lot of small- and medium-sized job shops. These small- and medium-sized manufacturing compani es have been facing keen competitive pressure in the market. This pressure has forced these companies to make every effort to shorten product developm ent lead-time, improve production efficiency, approach high-quality standar ds, but at the same time cut down the costs. To meet the needs of these com panies, this paper presents a compound cutting and punching production meth od supported by an integrated CAD/CAPP/CAM system in sheet metal manufactur ing. Many existing commercial CAD/CAM systems are not suitable for this man ufacturing method, especially under concurrent and global design and manufa cturing environments. Some problems have to be solved before these CAD/CAM systems can be employed and integrated for this compound manufacturing meth od. This paper deals mainly with the solutions to solve some of these probl ems. The solutions include an integrated data integration platform based on Pro/INTRALINK and STEP, and a knowledge-based real time CAPP (RTCAPP) syst em for compound sheet metal cutting and punching. Within the presented CAD/ CAPP/CAM system, some key modules have been developed. They are the automat ic tool selection and manufacturing sequencing module, a shortest tool path optimization module, a cost estimation module and an automatic insertion o f auxiliary path module based on knowledge bases. These modules will be add ressed here.