Computer aided setup planning for machining processes

This paper deals with an automatic setup planning system for machining processes of prismatic parts. The proposed system concurrently implements both machining sequences of reference surfaces and machining sequences of features for the purpose of minimizing number of setups in setup planning. Experienced planners' knowledge are represented as rules and used for machining sequences of reference surfaces and they are implemented by using EXSYS. A case study is performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed system.