Feature Based CAPP System

This paper presents an integrated feature based CAPP system that generates automated process plans for machining prismatic components. The CAPP system comprises a STEP compliant feature based commercial CAD system and the Smalltalk object oriented programming system. A library of features has been developed that is based on STEP based form feature taxonomy but modified to communicate the manufacturing intent. The CAPP system has been developed to represent the product, process and resource domain knowledge with a number of object hierarchies, communication methods, and the user interface that would suit the concurrent engineering needs. In addition, suitable geometric and process reasoning methods have been developed in the CAPP system that use the feature based component design data and generate automated process plans. The CAPP system test results have demonstrated that the proposed approach has been successful and has a great potential for further improvements in terms of flexibility, modularity, emerging data exchange standards, and ease in customising the CAPP system.