Coordinative Operation Planning for End Milling

In the conventional end-milling research, operation planning is fragmented into partial planning such as determination of fixturing method, tool path generation and selection of cutting condition. Fragmented plans in operation planning are generated separately, although those generations are dependent each other. Advanced machining operations are directed to complicated and/or thin shape workpiece precision machining. This trend requires considering the interdependency among the partial plans. This paper presents a besic framework and procedure of coordinative generation of total operation planning. A distributed constraint satisfaction based schema is introduced in order to manage the interdependency among partial plans. A prototype system of coordinative generation is evaluated by a low-rigidity workpiece machining problem as an example problem. The results of example shows an effectiveness of the method.