Development an automated feature-based process planning system for prismatic mechanical parts

Abstract

Today’s, automated process planning is becoming a widely prevalent technology in modern manufacturing systems. Feature concept is a core required to realize a fully integrated CAD/CAM system. The contents of a feature’s information can simply be transferred from one manufacturing activity to another. in the last few years, Automated process planning based on features technology has become popular with its capacity to combine design and manufacturing systematically. Despite its advantages, it is still difficult to recognize and extract manufacturing features automatically from the CAD system database. This paper addressed the development of a Feature-Based Process Planning System (FBPPS) integrated with CAD systems Automatically. The developed system used the knowledge-base method to execute process planning tasks that include; process selection, process sequences, machine tool selection, tool selection, and cutting conditions. Feature recognize module based on syntactic recognition technique has been introduced using CAD database of 3D component geometry model. The process planning module has been implemented using decision-making procedures based on the feature recognition stage. The proposed framework was implemented on personal computers using AutoCAD 2014 as the CAD modeling system and Visual-Basic 2010 as the programming environment to build the decision-making knowledge base. A 3D CAD model of the prismatic mechanical part has been selected as a case study to examine and evaluate the FBPPS ability. The final results of the test show the success of the proposed system on manufacturing feature recognition and generate a process plan automatically.