In a continuing quest to decrease the time interval between conceptualisation of a product and its first production, the use of information technology in design, analysis and manufacturing practice has been actively researched. The design engineer designs a part and sends the final design to the manufacturing engineer, who re-interprets the design and plans the manufacturing activities to produce the part. These two sections generally work in isolation from each other, resulting in high lead-time, duplication of data, inconsistent product data and sometimes redesign of a product. Feature recognition is a process of reinterpreting a design model database for automating downstream manufacturing activities. Active research in this field has developed numerous techniques such as syntactic pattern recognition, graph theory, volume decomposition, artificial intelligence and hint-based, and neural network-based systems. This paper presents a critical review of strengths and weaknesses of these approaches.
Today's manufacturing systems are striving for an integrated manufacturing environment. To achieve truly computerintegrated manufacturing systems (CIMS), the integration of process planning and production scheduling is essential. This paper proposes a framework for integration of process planning with production scheduling in a job shop environment for axisymmetric components. Based on the design specifications of incoming parts, feasible process plans are generated taking into account the real time shop floor status and availability of machine tools. The scheduling strategy prioritizes the machine tools based on cost considerations.
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