Abstract
Manufacturing industry tends to high-mix low-volume production, and it is strongly required to shorten the manufacturing lead time of products. In the field of machining, complex machining by means of multi-tasking machine tools attracts the attention. However, the machining operation is not easy to understand due to the highly complicated machine tool structure. Thus, NC programming for multi-tasking machine tools spends much time and labor. Therefore, it is required for CAPP/CAM system to minimize the effort of NC programming in terms of easily realizing highly efficient machining. Though there are some CAM systems for a multi-tasking machine tool, they generally need long operating time caused by the manual allocation of parts to generate tool paths. In this study, novel machining features are proposed for complex machining by means of multi-tasking machine tools. Proposed machining features deal with several alternative machining methods and contribute directly to the suitable allocation of machining order. Therefore, process planning can be conducted depending on machining strategy considering available cutting tools and the structure of a multi-tasking machine tool. From the result of case studies, it is found that the proposed machining features show the possibility to reduce the effort and to decide the effective machining process of complex machining.
