Object Oriented Intelligent Computer Intergrated Design, Process
Planning, and Inspection
M. Marefat (member IEEE)
email : marefat@ece.arizona.edu
S. Malhotra (student member IEEE)
email : malhotra@ecn.purdue.edu
R. L. Kashyap (Fellow IEEE)
email : kashyap@ecn.purdue.edu
ABSTRACT
An automated, flexible and intelligent computer integrated design, process planning and inspection
system is developed based on object-oriented design and analysis principles. A solid modeler or a
feature-based designer can be used to design parts. The solid modeler represents the part in terms of
low level entities (faces, edges) and the feature-based designer describes the part as a set of composite
entities (features). The solid modeler and the feature-based designer are integrated to facilitate both
creativity in design and convenience in modification of the part (designed by the solid modeler)
through the addition, movement and removal of features. Our system applies case-based reasoning,
i.e.- it uses the past experiences, to generate the process plan for a part. Inspection planning is used
for inspecting the finished parts and monitoring execution of operations. It intelligently determines
sensing strategies and computational procedures which can be used to inspect important attributes of a
component. The knowledge about the system and its procedures is encapsulated in objects and
associated methods using the object-oriented paradigm. Inheritance and encapsulation are exploited to
enhance the extensible nature of the system in terms of the domain of the system (different kinds of
parts), the capabilities of the system (fixturing in process planning) and the knowledge of the system
(new processes and tools). An exploratory prototype based on the ideas and methodology presented
in this paper is developed using Smalltalk's purely object oriented environment.
Index terms:
Computer integrated manufacturing, Process planning, Computer aided design,
Object-Oriented design, CAD-Based inspection, geometric reasoning