CAD systems export the product design information in a geometric data, but CAPP systems need the information on the manufacturing of the product to make the process planning. This thesis presents an interactive feature extraction method using STEP AP2...
CAD systems export the product design information in a geometric data, but CAPP systems need the information on the manufacturing of the product to make the process planning. This thesis presents an interactive feature extraction method using STEP AP224 to extract the machining features from part geometry. So, this method can integrate the CAD and CAPP systems. This method is developed using the feature representation method in STEP AP224. STEP is a standard for the exchange of product data between CAD, CAPP and CAM systems. And STEP AP (application protocols) 224 includes the full information on machining features for process planning. The utilization of STEP AP22 ensures that this feature extraction method could extract the feature information completely. One prototype system named Feature Extraction System is developed to implement this feature extraction method. This system can extract the feature attributes and parameters from the CAD file interactively. Another advantage of this system is the ability to associate the tolerance which is not contained in the part geometry. A case study is given to illustrate the feature extraction process in the Feature Extraction System.