5. Compound Machining Method for OKP Product Development

In sheet metal processing and manufacturing, there are many small or medium sized enterprises (SMEs). These OKP manufacturing companies have been facing keen competitive pressure in the market, which has forced these companies to make every effort to shorten PD lead time, improve production efficiency, approach high quality standards, and at the same time cut down the costs. To meet the needs of these companies, this chapter presents a compound cutting and punching production method supported by an integrated CAD/CAPP/CAM system for sheet metal manufacturing. Many existing commercial CAD/CAM systems are not suitable for this manufacturing method, especially under concurrent and global design and manufacturing environments. Some problems have to be solved before these CAD/CAM systems can be employed and integrated into this compound manufacturing method. This chapter deals with solutions to some of these problems. The solutions include an integrated data integration platform based on Pro/INTRALINK and STEP, and a knowledge-based real-time CAPP (RTCAPP) system for compound sheet metal cutting and punching. Within the proposed CAD/CAPP/CAM system, some key modules have been developed. They are the automatic tool selection and manufacturing sequencing module, a shortest tool path optimisation module, a cost estimation module and an automatic insertion of auxiliary path module based on knowledge bases. These modules will be described in this chapter.