Modelling machine tool data in support of STEP-NC based manufacturing

STEP-NC-based manufacturing is a promising approach for digital manufacturing applications. However, as STEP-NC data are machine tool independent, when implementing STEP-NC-based process planning and manufacturing, a comprehensive machine tool database is required to provide machine tool data for generating machine-tool-dependent process plans. A novel STEP-NC compliant machine tool data model named STEP-NCMtDm has been developed to realise STEP-NC based process planning and manufacturing. The goals of STEP-NCMtDm are to meet the data requirements for implementing STEP-NC data model in process planning and scheduling, and to support the distributed manufacturing environment. EXPRESS language is used for constructing the data model, and a web-based data model is also built to support distributed manufacturing scenarios by using the corresponding extensible markup language (XML) schema. A milling machine tool is used to evaluate the proposed data model. It has been demonstrated that STEP-NCMtDm can provide adequate information for STEP-NC programming.