On the automatic generation of set-ups given a feature-based design representation

A design methodology has been developed which takes manufacturing restrictions into account in the geometric design phase. This has been accomplished by defining Manufacturable design transformations. A Manufacturable design transformation is a design operation which has one or more manufacturing operations as counterpart. The applied design operations are recorded in a Design Tree which is an integral pan of the product model. Process planning converts this Design Tree, given the available manufacturing machines, fixturing tools and machining tools, into a Manufacturing Tree. The Manufacturing Tree consists of one or more set-ups with per set-up a collection of basic manufacturing operations. This paper deals with the automatic generation of set-ups given a design representation based on Manufacturable design transformations. The main advantage of this approach is a faster generation of set-ups. Furthermore, the generated set-ups and the collection of basic manufacturing operations per set-up can be used for automatic generation of NC code.