STEP-compliant NC research: the search for intelligent CAD/CAPP/CAM CNC integration

Since the first generation of Numerically Controlled (NC) machine tools was developed in the 1950s, there have been many developments which make today's NC machines completely unrecognizable from their early ancestors. Further developments, however, are now being significantly limited by the current programming language (ISO6983 or RS274D) that has been supporting NC manufacture since day one. Today a new standard, informally known as STEPNC, is being used as the basis for development of the next generation of Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) controller. This new standard is ISO 14649 and ISO 10303 AP 238. This standard gives CAM and CNC vendors the opportunity to integrate the capabilities of CAD/CAM systems with a new breed of intelligent CNC controllers, which have bi-directional communication of information representing standardized geometric and manufacturing data. This paper presents a comprehensive review of STEP-NC developments for a range of CNC processes. These developments include some major projects collaborated at the international level as well as those carried out by different groups of researchers in countries such as Germany, Switzerland, UK, Korea, USA and New Zealand. This paper also tries to portray a futuristic view of STEP-NC applications for CAD, CAPP, CAM and CNC integration, identifies the issues and challenges for STEP-NC, and provides a vision of a STEP-NC- compliant process chain supported by a product and manufacturing model.