Rapid process planning in CNC machining for rapid manufacturing applications

Process planning is an important component in Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining and directly influences the efficiency of cutting operations. However the planning task is highly dependent on the user’s experience and is usually considered as a manual process. This paper seeks to remedy these problems by developing a tool to assist in executing the process planning task in CNC machining for rapid manufacturing applications. An advanced tool in Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) systems is exploited to record and generate programming code for instructions used to construct the operations. The code is then modified and integrated into the independent Graphical User Interface (GUI) to execute the process planning tasks within the CAM systems. Consequently, a customized program is developed and is capable of building the machining operations for all kinds of parts. The time spent for process planning is minimized and at the same time planning complexity that is highly depend on the user’s experience is reduced.