Towards the development of a smart manufacturing system for the automated remodeling and manufacturing of standard parts

The standard components of a scalable product incur minor design changes to meet functional requirements, such as a change in load or capacity. Usually, this leads to a complete renewal of the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Manufacturing sequence of such parts, which is tedious and time-consuming. This paper proposes developing an integrated smart system for automated remodeling and manufacturing of such reconfigurable standard components. It includes three main steps: automatic remodeling of CAD model, automatic feature extraction from XML, and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) part program generation with minimal human intervention. In case the user adds new features to the standard design of the component, the proposed system can extend its ability by enabling automatic recognition of general machining features using the STEP AP-203 file. The whole development process of standard products is serialized by parameters and computations to achieve an automated design procedure that is integrated into Autodesk Inventor software. It is then combined with the developed algorithm of automatic feature recognition and automated toolpath generation using Vb.net. The modular design of the system allows the reconfiguration of the individual modules to include extra capabilities without affecting the whole system. Finally, a case study was presented for the design and manufacturing of a typical component of the conveyor system to demonstrates the efficacy of the developed system.