Adaptive CAM planning to support co-design in the building industry

Abstract

Co-design describes a collaborative design process between different stakeholders. These stakeholders usually come from various domains. To enable co-design, data has to be exchanged between the stakeholders. Current approaches to data management in the building industry are usually oriented along the process chain and therefore only allow a unidirectional flow of information. This is an obstacle in the implementation of co-design within the building industry.As more and more buildings are built by utilizing prefabricated modules to accelerate the on-site building process and to reduce the cost, a major effort in terms of implementing co-design is to link the design information of the building industry with the production information of the manufacturing industry. The problem occurs as the building industry mainly uses the fndustry Foundation Classes and the manufacturing industry uses the Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data as a data format to exchange information. This leads to a break in the flow of information. Furthermore, information about the manufacturability of products, that is generated during the computer-aided manufacturing process, cannot be easily returned to the architect who can utilize the information to adapt the design in the computer-aided design process.This paper addresses these problems by defining a data processing pipeline that enables the conversion of the geometric design information stored in IFC into the STEP data format. From there, the CAM strategy can be defined and results in an executable G-Code. The information of the CAM planning is returned to the architect, who can adapt the design by interpreting the results of the CAM processing. To close the co-design loop, the G-Code for the design adaptions can be generated automatically by reusing the predefined CAM strategy.