Development of a generic computer-aided process planning support system

Although there is significant industrial need for comprehensive computer-aided process planning (CAPP) systems, most traditional CAPP solutions have been fragmented in nature. This is because each CAPP domain (assembly, machining, inspection, etc.) has been treated independently. This paper argues in favor of adopting 'feature-orientation' as the unifying theme and describes a Generic CAPP Support System along with the geometric feature recognition algorithms involved. Finally, some case studies derived from diverse application domains are presented to illustrate the advantages provided by the approach. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.