Development of a computer-integrated system to support CAD to CAPP

During the 1990s, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Process Planning (CAPP) have emerged as effective means of improving productivity and efficiency, resulting in widespread research work related to CAD and CAPP integration in the hope of achieving seamless data flow among the relevant computer systems. Unfortunately, the efficiency of process planning systems still needs significant improvement due to the problems of design data loss or design data mis-interpretation. This paper attempts to introduce an intelligent computer-integrated system for reliable design feature recognition in order to achieve automatic process planning. Moreover, it describes a rule-based computer-integrated system for recognizing features of components stored as STEP format, analyzing the design files and designing manufacturing processes. In this approach, the STEP design file is used as the information source for generating detailed manufacturing process. The significance of this research is that the product designs with dissimilar formats from various CAD systems can now be interconnected and automatically coded for multiple manufacturing purposes. It presents an effective method that rule-based reasoning is used to create optimal process plans for metal cutting.