IN-PROCESS MODEL GENERATION FOR THE PROCESS PLANNING OF A PRISMATIC PART
Sang C. Park, GOPALAN MUKUNDAN, Shuxin Gu, Gustav J. Olling · Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Systems · 2003
It is very essential to have 3D geometry of In-Process Models (IPMs) for the integration of various activities related to process planning. The accuracy of IPMs is not critical at the initial process planning stage but it becomes very important for the detailed process planning stage since inaccurate IPMs may result in costly mistakes. This paper proposes a procedure to generate accurate IPMs for the detailed process planning of a prismatic part. We transform the IPM generation problem into well-known 2D geometric problems, and use 2D geometric algorithms (2D curve offset, Voronoi diagram and polygonal chain intersection) instead of generalized 3D algorithms. Since highly optimized solutions are available for these 2D geometric problems, the proposed procedure achieves the efficiency and robustness by simply combining proven 2D geometric algorithms.