Selection of machinable volumes. An object-oriented approach

An object-oriented approach for selection of machinable volumes to be included in a process plan is presented. The approach uses a feature-based part representation. Volumes of the material to be removed are generated in parallel with the definition of form features of the part. Geometric reasoning is used for grouping these volumes into a set of machinable volumes. The selection of machinable volumes with the minimum corresponding machining cost, fixture and tool-utilization costs is performed by a heuristic algorithm. Precedence constraints among machinable volumes are established and used to generate a sequence of machinable volumes. The concepts introduced in the paper have been implemented in Smalltalk-80 object-oriented programming environment.