A CASE RETRIEVING SYSTEM FOR MACHINING PROCESSES OF AXISYMMETRIC PARTS BASED ON GEOMETRIC INDEXING AND PROCESS HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE

摘要

To develop a new machining process plan in the competitive global market, one effective way is to retrieve a relevant case similar to the new desired case and then adapt it to meet the new situations. This paper proposes a retrieving system for process planning cases from two aspects - the representation and manufacturing processes of a part. The core of the retrieving system contains 1) the feature-based representation of a part, 2) indexing of a part based on two-dimensional peripheral indexing and feature indexing, 3) a hierarchical structure of cutting processes from part cutting history, 4) a similarity metric. The similarity metric is used to measure the similarity between the new desired part and one old case based on the indexes of the parts. The application domain here is the process planning for axisymmetric parts. The proposed retrieving system is implemented in a Sun workstation using ACIS 3D-Toolkit and C++.