INTEGRATED FEATURE RECOGNITION AND SETUP PLANNING

Abstract

Computer-aided process planning (CAPP) is a vital link in the integration of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). In today's competitive market CAD and CAM play a very important role to expedite the design and manufacturing activities to meet the demand. There are numerous advanced systems that have been developed in the area of CAD and CAM. But the important link CAPP is still weak in the computerized manufacturing environment. Feature recognition and setup planning are very crucial activities in CAPP. Enough research has been done on feature recognition compared to setup planning. This work proposes a methodology to integrate the feature recognition and setup planning activities of CAPP. Existing methods have been used in the feature recognition technique to determine the size and location of the features of the part. From this size and location algorithm feature enclosing surfaces, vertices, openness of the feature are determined. Based on the locational facts and openness the features are classified. A new method has been introduced in this work for identification of feature shape. The entity type and angle between the entities are used to determine the shape. For setup planning the input has been taken from the feature recognition module. Tool Approach Direction (TAD) and commonality of tools used by the features are the factors used in this work for setup formation. Based on the precedence relationship matrix, the operation sequencing is done using the genetic algorithm. Setup sequencing is generated based on good manufacturing practices. Thumb rules have been used in this work to generate the setup sequencing. The proposed methodology has been explained using prismatic part as an example. Also an attempt has been made to automate this proposed approach in MicrosofT Excel.