Knowledge-Based CAD/CAPP/CAM Integration System for Manufacturing

Integration of CAD/CAPP/CAM is a natural result of scientific advance; such integration fulfills an overall automation and intelligence from product design to manufacturing in enterprises. In the paper, a new CAPP system is involved in and some new methods are introduced. The CAPP system is based on UG software, which is used as a platform of CAD/CAM system. A new way adopting the UG/API function to develop an interface between CAD and CAPP is employed to make feature extraction that can be transferred from CAD to CAPP. Then part information is sent to a knowledge base in the CAPP system. Process planning can be automatically generated through reasoning processes. The architecture of integration system and design methods are presented.