Reverse Engineering for Manufacturing Approach: Based on the Combination of 3D and Knowledge Information

Abstract

Today industrial companies are still trying to optimize in terms of time and cost the re-manufacturing of mechanical components. They need to directly define a new process planning from 3D information (points cloud, drawings…). This paper proposes an approach called Reverse Engineering For Manufacturing (REFM) which allows to directly obtain a CAPP (Computer Aided Process Planning) model from 3D and knowledge information. Routine tasks will also be taken into account. In this paper, RE is considered as a specific domain and concerns parts where no information is available on them. The system management is based on Design For Manufacturing (DFM) approach and enables to manage manufacturing information (the number of fixtures, the kind of milling operations..). Additionally, the future REFM system will have to propose alternatives for CAPP models. Therefore the main innovative point of REFM is to develop “manufacturing knowledge extraction” phase which is the aim of this paper.