Interoperable process planning facility for turn/mill components

This paper reports ongoing research into the application of new standards for CNC machining to enable quality assured customised part manufacture by implementing the new standard, ISO 14649 otherwise known as STEP-NC. The STEP-NC standard presents the opportunity to develop a new structure for feature-based process planning for manufacturing through the direct use of CAD data which form the direct input format into the NC and to address the process planning and machining of turn/mill discrete components. This paper proposes a STEP Compliant NC structure for generation of ISO 14646 code which can be used for turn/mill component manufacture and proposes manufacturing and process models based on a combination of the ISO 14649 standards to represent turning, milling and their respective tooling standards. Finally, the use of the individual parts of the evolving standard ISO 14649, namely Part 10, 12, and 121 has been investigated to provide the means to represent STEP-compliant turn/mill component program.