Setup planning and tolerance analysis

Fierce global competition and computer technology lead manufacturing industry to a new era. CAD/CAM system development becomes more active then ever before to ensure the product quality before committing vast investment to set up manufacturing facilities. However setup planning is the major key to transform design concept into manufacturing domain, which is mainly experience based activity in modern manufacturing industry.; A new integrated CAD/CAM system has been proposed from system level instead of function level by coping with correlated manufacturing activities. Setup planning as the crucial role of the CAD/CAM integrated system is performed mainly based on tolerance analysis. In order to analyze tolerance chains of a setup plan, an unique and effective tool is discovered to manipulate features, tolerance relations and setups by extending the generic graph theory. More setup planning principles and algorithms are explored to automatically generate setup plans in accordance with manufacturing resource capabilities and production schemes. Intra-setup tolerance analysis, as the subsidiary level of inter-setup tolerance analysis, leads to a series of rigorous mathematical model to perform locating accuracy analysis and tolerance assignment by taking fixturing information into account.; The system is further explored by integrating the knowledge of fixture design, process, and manufacturing resources modeling. It thus becomes a vital technique to employ concurrent engineering by linking CAD/CAM in depth.