Automated Process Planning for CNC Machining

A large portion of today's industrial manufacturing relies on At Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), researchers recognized the potential business value to designers as well as manufacturers, and this value proposition was validated during project execution by presenting early prototypes of the software to potential users. The objective of PARC's uFab project hence was to create a software tool that, given just a CAD file and a representation of available machines and tools, generates a process plan in real time. While work in this area had been done in the 1980s under the name computer-aided process planning (CAPP) (Alting and Zhang 1989), none of the approaches that were pursued then resulted in a fully automated solution. A major shortcoming of these systems was their reliance on features, recognizable configurations of faces on a part such as pockets, slots, and holes, in order to represent states and actions. Any advances that This reliance on feature-based representations to these domain-specific needs, implementing are specific to domain-independent hindered their broad applicability the actual search used for planning in PDDL, such as the powerful to parts that could not be easily planning was the easy part.