A STEP-Compliant “Adaptor” for Linking CAPP with CNC

Combination of a series of STEP APs and the new ISO 14649 STEP-NC forms a unified data format for the entire product’s lifecycle. The research reported in this paper is a framework for adapting STEP-compliant manufacturing information for a CNC machine. This information is represented in STEP-NC format containing entities such as “Workplan”, “Workingstep” and “Machining Features”, as stipulated in ISO 14649. This type of information is assumed to be machine-independent, hence it is the information about “what-to-do” rather than “how-to-do”. This system can generate the “how-to-do” information when a machine tool is chosen for the job. There are three parts in this system, a native CNC System knowledge database, a Translator and a Human-Machine interface