An IGES pre-processor to integrate CAD and CAPP for turned components

Abstract

EXCAP, is a knowledge-based process-planning system for rotational components. CADEXCAP is software which has been developed to integrate EXCAP with CAD systems via IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification). CADEXCAP deciphers a full 2D model of a turned component developed on a CAD system and then via IGES it fully automatically generates a product model in a format suitable for EXCAP.CADEXCAP has a modular structure of three modules: "readiges", "preprocess" and "postprocess". The "preprocess" module, which is the concern of this paper, was written in FORTRAN77 to pre-process the IGES entities. The preprocessing process includes two main tasks. The first task is to extract only the necessary information from the 1GES entities. The second task is to locate the entities in one coherent coordinate system, which is the model space coordinate system, using transformation matrices.