CAD/CAM


Introduction

The aim of this paper is to propose a framework for supporting design and manufacturing process and to verify it by the application to NC (Numerical Contr ol) machining. The main purpose of the framework is to provide a user with ``the meaning of a product,'' which may be interpreted as looking for a relationship between design informations at each phase, through a manipulation of design information stored at a database. The recognition of the relationship is necessary for reflecting design changes in an arbitrary phase to design informations of other phases appropriately. The reflection work is defined in this paper as supporting design and manufacturing process. In this framework, design information at the design and manufacturing process is modeled by several description-level component sets. Each set consists of several component sets for the level of specification, function, structure, entity, and production. These are stored in an integrated database. In the database, the components are linked to each other in each set, and then are linked between different sets. The framework provides two ways of operation on these components. One operation is to construct each description-level model using the corresponding level parts. The other one is to translate from one model to another model, and propagate the modifications of models using the link information. This research will show that ``the meaning of a product'' could be handled in a prototype system of the above framework.


Project