INTEGRATION OF A CIM TOOL MANAGEMENT-SYSTEM TO AN INTELLIGENT FEATURE-BASED PROCESS PLANNING SYSTEM

As various islands of automation (flexible manufacturing systems, CAD/CAM systems, tool management systems, etc.) have been developed, so has also the interest in their integration been growing rapidly. A technology program for automation in manufacturing was carried out at TUT during 1986-1989. It resulted in several islands of automation: a flexible manufacturing system for rotation-symmetric parts, a CAD/CAM system, an automated coordinate measuring cell and a tool management system for a CIM environment. The next step to be taken was naturally to solve the problems dealing with the integration of these islands. Feature modelling was chosen to be one of the "glue" elements for this work. To ensure the practicality of solutions industrial partners were invited to the project. The qualitative goals of the implementation were: (1) To introduce a feature-based system that offers tooling data and planning rules to support computerized methods that enable the part designer to analyze manufacturing problems and accommodate them in his design. (2) To develop a feature-based process planning system for tooling and machining parameter selection and cost analysis for methods planning and NC-programming. (3) To introduce a feature-based system to collect shop-floor information of tooling and machining parameters and quality feed-back for the development of planning rules. (4) To develop an integrated total tool management system that enables all tool information to be created and stored at its source and to be used where needed. (5) The system is developed to support especially small-batch manufacturing. It should also be possible to easily adapt the system for new factories. This was one reason for implementing the system in a PC environment. The overall goal was to shorten the lead times from order to finished products by supporting feature-based design and to improve both quality by developing planning rules and cost efficiency by effective use of machinery and tooling. Even one-of-a-kind products can thus be designed by using standard features and their planning rules, thus ensuring manufacturability. The main emphasis of the implementation has not been on automating the whole tool management, but on providing the user with interactive aid-functions, which help him to master the information flow. According to our experience fully automated systems that only give end results without the possibility of checking the correctness of intermediate results have only a small relevance. Although the tool management part of the complete system has been so far used with production systems dealing with machining only, there are no obstructions to apply the idea to other processes needed in mechanical part production as well.