What Is a Manufacturing Interaction?

Abstract In this work we make a distinction between feature interactions and manufacturing interactions. These two terms are usually used interchangeably because feature and manufacturing interactions often occur together, but not always. However, we feel that it is important to make a distinction between feature interactions which result from volumetric intersections of features presenting difficulties for features extractors, and manufacturing interactions which occur when two manufacturing operations interfere with each other’s execution, and present a problem to the process planner. By separating these definitions it allows us to focus separately on each phenomena. In this paper our focus is on manufacturing interactions. We present a non-exhaustive catalog of common manufacturing interaction types in CNC machining, and discuss how they result in precedence constraints in the manufacturing plan.