An industry-based study of cutting process capability representation requirements for an integrated simultaneous engineering workstation

The drive to integrate process planning with design systems to achieve concurrent engineering places new demands on the knowledge used in automated process selection. This paper highlights the current fragmented and unstructured nature of cutting process capability representation. Advances made in developing complementary models needed to analyse spatial process constraints are described in the context of an industrial case study and a simultaneous engineering workstation (SEW). The SEW uses a library of volumetric removal features to describe the shape-producing capabilities of processes. Attempting to model and plan sample parts on site showed up some problems in mapping from features used in design to the manufacturing processes, identified implicit interactions between features that needed to be recognized and showed a need for more detailed process error modeling. To overcome these limitations, geometric reasoning algorithms and complementary tool and machine models have been developed.