Symbolic Representation of Manufacturing Features for an Automated Process Planning System

摘要

In the manufacturing environment, process planning can be defined as the act of preparing a detailed plan for the production of a part or assembly. The selection and sequencing of operations necessary to transform the raw material into a finished part is its primary objective. An expert system, XCUT, is currently being developed at Allied Corporation, Bendix Kansas City Division (BXC), which will generate process plans for the production of machined piece-parts given a feature-based part description. The input to this system will represent each part as a collection of manufacturing features where each feature is a region of the part which has some degree of manufacturing significance. Each feature is characterized as a structural entity; whose attributes specify lower-level topology, geometry, or tolerance information. This paper introduces a structure for representing features in the XCUT system using symbolic and object-oriented programming techniques. (ERA citation 12:001048)