The Development of Manufacturing Feature Recognition Method

Abstract

In the production stage, dynamic changes such as increased production, machine breakdowns etc are ordinary occurrences. To deal with these dynamic changes, we presupposed the need to integrate design, manufacturing and scheduling activities. In order to develop a process planning system that can manage the dynamic changes in production stage and also integrate the design, manufacturing and scheduling activities, we proposed a manufacturing feature recognition method for the generation of multiple process plans to provide alternative plans for the process planning 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, 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.