A STEP-Compliant Intelligent Process Planning System for Milling

The new standard ISO 14649 provides CAD/CAPP/CAM/CNC with an interface and a comprehensive high level and detailed manufacturing information. CNC technology based on STEP-NC will be the future trend, and the intelligent process planning is the core of STEP-NC oriented CNC technology. The objective of this research is to present the architecture, key technologies and implementation of STEP-NC oriented intelligent computer-aided process planning system. Some key technologies, such as feature recognition, setup planning, operations selection, tool selection, machine tool selection and process planning optimization are described in detail. A hybrid approach based on artificial intelligent techniques (neural networks, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm) is adopted as the inference engine in the proposed system. Based on Solidworks CAD platform, the corresponding prototype system was developed using VB.NET programming language. The implementation of the proposed ST-ICAPP system is demonstrated by an example case study. The result shows that the proposed system is valid and feasible.