Abstract
This paper describes a manufacturing feature recognition method for the generation of multiple process plans to provide alternative plans for a CAPP system. The manufacturing feature recognition method is constructed in 2 phases. First, using Extended Super Relation Graph Method, interacting and overlapping features can be extracted in several different ways, corresponding with different kind of machining operations. In the second phase, using Feature Spatial Relation Method, manufacturing features are organized into multiple manufacturing feature sets, where each manufacturing feature set corresponds with different kind of process plans. In this paper, the development of the Extended SRG Method to recognize not only primitive manufacturing features such as holes, slots and pockets, but also compound manufacturing features such as stepped-hole is discussed, and a case study to confirm the validity of the proposed development is presented.
