An integrated manufacturing information system for mass sheet metal cutting

In order to reduce manufacturing cost and to improve the operational efficiency, some factories in the sheet-metal-related manufacturing industry centralize the production and management of sheet metal cutting. To support the centralized mass manufacturing paradigm, this paper presents an integrated manufacturing information system to achieve the high utilization of raw sheet material, lower the manufacturing cost, as well as to improve the operational efficiency and production management. The system architecture and some key technologies to implement this system are investigated, based on which, the whole information system is developed. This system integrates the functions of sheet metal part modeling and unfolding, nesting planning, automatic and interactive nesting, cutting process planning, NC-programming, off-line processing simulation and on-line monitoring. The system has been successfully utilized in industry, and an example of its application is described in the paper.