NC process reuse-oriented flexible process planning optimization approach for prismatic parts

NC process reuse is a new strategy to generate the process scheme for parts with higher efficiency. However, the existing process planning approaches based on NC process reuse are few and far from the requirements of actual machining. To address this urgent industrial need, this paper proposes a novel NC process reuse-oriented flexible process planning optimization approach for prismatic parts with the objective of minimizing total manufacturing cost. Firstly, the NC process candidate inheritance mechanisms are explored to generate the NC process candidates for query subparts efficiently and automatically. Secondly, the NC process for each query subpart is selected using the roulette wheel approach in terms of the reusability. Then, through the analysis of feature attributes, the precedence constraint feature-driven characteristic is revealed to determine the precedence between operations. Moreover, the precedence and distances between operations are formulated in an operation precedence graph (OPG). Finally, a hybrid ant colony algorithm (ACA) and simulated annealing (SA) approach based on OPG is presented to achieve the global optimal NC process scheme for the part. In the experiments, a prototype system based on CATIA is developed and a prismatic part is conducted to illustrate the application effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve highly satisfactory results and outperform other approaches.