An Interactive Process Planning System for Prismatic Parts (ICAPP)

Summary This paper presents an Interactive automatic process planning system ICAPP (Interactive Computer Aided Process Planning) for non-rotational prismatic parts produced on machining centres and conventional milling, drilling and boring machines. The ICAPP system is feature oriented and is capable of processing eight basic machining processes, i.e. face milling, peripheral milling, drilling, boring, reaming, tapping, counterboring and countersinking, using both variant planning, via the part family concept, and generative planning. Machining operations can be planned interactively so that appropriate tasks can be shared by the computer and the planner to improve the overall system performance.