Development of a Simple and Affordable Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP)

This study is conducted to investigate the process planning that concerned with the preparation of route sheets that list the sequence of operations and work centers required to produce the product and its components. On the computer controlled machine tools, operation methods and mostly used process types in manufacture are drawn with solid modeling. From this digital model, information can be extracted and processed by a Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) application to plan the sheet route to manufacture the product. CAPP system application has tended to be within the machining domain in manufacturing. In past, CAPP systems rarely considered facility status in decision making. The CAPP is a critical link between CAD/CAM in order to perform a process plan automatically. General CAPP is not used in majority of traditional fabrication shops. This research aims to develop a affordable and simple CAPP system to solve such problem for fabrication shops. The main program was developed by Visual C++ and involved manufacturing databases such as cutting tools databases, material databases and drawing databases. The main program reads data from a DXF file and TXT file that is exported from AutoCAD. When the program is performed, the operation sequence is generated as well as material, cutting and parameter selection of the product. Few case studies were conducted to observe the efficiency of the proposed CAPP system.