Intelligent Approach for Part Family Searching and Cutting Tool Matching in FMS

Abstract

Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is an automated manufacturing system which is suitable for small and medium batch production. Usually FMS can not only satisfy existing parts machining, but also have the ability to adapt to new parts machining when the products changes with the market demand. The automation of new parts process planning is hard to achieve because of the limitation of the current CAPP technology, the complexity of FMS, and diversity of parts.To solve the problems above, this paper proposes an intelligent approach to determine machining family and cutting tool for new parts using case-based reasoning method which is based on artificial intelligence technique and artificial neural network, part family search and tool matching are the important part of CAPP especially for variant CAPP. In this new approach , first, the existing parts are considered as cases, the relationship among parts information, machining families and cutting tools from the existing parts in FMS is established by means of artificial neural network and the relational model is obtained after ANN is trained with the cases, then the two key problems, searching the machining family automatically and matching tool set from huge cutting tool group intelligently for new parts machining can be realized in FMS, This paper aims to make the existing FMS adapt to the new parts machining when market demanding changing, improve the intelligent level of FMS and the enterprise's ability to response market rapidly and provide technical support for intelligent manufacturing.