The innovation beyond the state of the art:
The aim of the project is to create a STEP-NC compliant manufacturing support application for machining technologies such as milling and turning to respond to the global requirement for an interoperable and bidirectional manufacturing platform for SMEs in order to increase their competitiveness. The performance of the application will be tested on milling and turning manufacturing.
The objectives are as follow:
- Realisation of a high productivity STEP-NC standard compliant application. A STEP and STEP-NC compliant application will be developed, which is (1) able to cooperate with commercial CAD thought STEP standard (as product model) for product data exchange (ISO 10303) and (2) support product and manufacturing data integration (as manufacturing model) down to the machine tools through the use of STEP-NC (ISO 14649 standards).
- Easy to use and faster machine programming. The operator will be able to see the product and manufacturing information together and simulations will allow manufacturing without error for the first time. The new application will support manufacturing with an extensive library of materials, tools, common manufacturing processes.
- Increased overall manufacturing efficiency. The SMEs will be able to increase their manufacturing output in the long run, because the application will store all the manufacturing history in a structured and searchable way leading to traceability.
- Toward universal manufacturing platform: Interactive guidelines (or tutorials) of the application will help CAD/CAM software developers to integrate additional manufacturing technologies.