ISO 14649 (STEP-NC): New standards for CNC machining

The changing economic climate has made global manufacturing a growing reality over the last decade, forcing companies from east and west and all over the world to collaborate beyond geographic boundaries in the design, manufacture and assemble of products. The ISO10303 and ISO14649 Standards (STEP and STEPNC) have been developed to introduce interoperability into manufacturing enterprises so as to meet the challenge of responding to production on demand. This paper reviews the exploration of new standards for CNC machining to enable quality assured customized part manufacture by implementing the new standard, ISO 14649 otherwise known as STEP-NC Compliant manufacture. The paper focuses on the use of this new standard to address the process planning and machining of turn/mill discrete components. Today complex turn/mill components can be produced on a wide range of turning centre configurations with multi axes, twin spindles and dual turrets. Due to the complexity of programming these machines there is a need to model their process capability to improve the interoperable manufacturing capability in places such as turning centres. This research will enable design and manufacture information to be transferred across continents enabling interoperable manufacture and more focus for process planning requirements. Finally a proposed computational environment for a STEP-NC compliant system for turning operations (SCSTO) is described. SCSTO is the experimental part of the research, supported by the specification of information models and constructed using a structured methodology and object-oriented methods. SCSTO was developed to generate a Part 21 file based on machining features to support the interactive generation of process plans utilizing feature extraction. A case study component has been developed to prove the concept for using the milling and turning parts of ISO14649 to provide a turn-mill CAD/CAPP/CAM environment