A HYBRID APPROACH FOR SET-UP PLANNING

In this paper, various constraints on set-up planning are identified and discussed. Rules and heuristics are created based on these constraints to determine the bilateral precedence relationships between the machining process of features and tool approach directions. By looking at the problem caused by the conflict between the feature precedence relationships and set-up precedence relationships, an optimisation approach is developed to find the optimal plan(s) from all the feasible setup candidates. The criterion used is the minimum number of set-ups. As a result, alternative set-up plans are generated with a certain number of set-ups required. This research is limited to machining prismatic components only.