EVALUATION OF COMPUTER GENERATED PROCESS PLANS FOR TURNED COMPONENTS ON THE BASIS OF MANUFACTURING TIME

Abstract

Process planning is an activity to plan the strategy for manufacture of a component. With the emergence of CAD/CAM techniques and need of shorter lead times and optimum use of facilities, a need exists to automate the process planning activity. In this direction, a generative process planning system was reported [18] in which the process plans were evaluated on the basis of machining time and number of tool setup changes. The present work is an extension of this previous work. In this report, a method has been developed for the evaluation of computer generated process plans for turned components on the basis of manufacturing time which includes machining as well as nonproductive times. The process plans with least manufacturing time are selected. The major thrust of this report is the calculation of nonproductive times during and between operations performed on a turned component, which is includes the time standards for the operations concerned. To achieve the same, a software has been developed in FORTRAN-IV. A brief review of computer process planning, computer generated time standards and existing systems for both, is also presented.