Development of an integrated system for setup planning and fixture design in CAPP

The separation of CAPP and CAFD often causes conflict and delays for the product development. This paper overcomes these obstacles by describing a developed system that is capable of carrying out setup planning and fixture design concurrently. An intelligent approach for setup planning is introduced. In this approach, the setups are automatically planned based on key factors of machining practice, tolerance requirement, manufacturing cost and fixturing constraints from the feedback of fixture design. Further more, a hybrid RBR and fuzzy evaluation method based automatic fixture design approach is also described. In proposed system, the feedback of fixture design is to ensure that the setup plan for machined part is generated on the basis of feasible fixture plan. An example is presented to illustrate the proposed system