Towards a Feature-based Agent-driven NC Tool Path Generation to Support Design and Process Changes

AbstractOn the shop floor of manufacturing aircraft structural parts, design changes and machining process changes accompany the entire development cycle of aircraft products. Such constant changes represent a typical characteristic of a dynamic and integrated design and manufacturing environment. For such an environment, a feature-based, and agent-driven automatic numerical control tool path generation method is proposed in this paper. An object-oriented collaboration framework is employed to implement well-defined machining features which keep engineering knowledge about tool path generation, and those involved processes. Agents are used for collaboration control, function services and domain mediation to propagate design and process changes to machining features. Machining features are activated by agents to make the proper responses automatically. A prototype for feature-based tool path generation has been developed to verify the proposed method.

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