77 Research on an Integrated Architecture of Automatic Process Planning Based on Automatic Reasoning Rule

In this paper, an architecture using integration of CAD/CAPP and automatic reasoning process for process planning in manufacturing process is investigated. The architecture is built based on a knowledge base, a resource database and an automatic reasoning kernel as well as an interface of CAD/CAPP. The interface based on design feature extraction plays an important role for integration of CAD/CAPP. It extracts the necessary feature information from CAD for automatic process planning. In the automatic reasoning kernel, the generation phases of process plan are analyzed and relevant reasoning rules are established. In order to ensure that the reasoning results satisfy real application, these reasoning rules can be dynamically adjusted and continuously improved when the system is used. Finally, a set of software based on the architecture and reasoning rules is developed so as to verify the architecture reasonable for real application.