Inspection process is an essential part of the entire machining chain providing measurement feedback to the process planning system. Fully automated machining process requires automatic inspection process planning and real-time inspection result feedback. As inspection process planning is still based on the G&M code containing low-level information or vender-specific bespoke routine, inspection process planning is mostly isolated from machining process planning. With the development of new data model standards STEP and STEP-NC providing high-level product information for the entire machining chain, hence it is achievable to combine machining and inspection process planning to generate optimal machining and inspection sequence with real-time measurement result feedback. This paper introduces an integrated process planning system framework for combined machining and inspection. In order to provide real-time inspection feedback, On-Machine Inspection (OMI) is chosen to carry out inspection operations. Implementation of the proposed system has been partially carried out with a newly developed data model and a interpreter software. A case study was carried out to test the feasibility of the proposed system.
展开▼
