Computer aided foundry models design

The traditional approach to resolving the design and process planning tasks, commonly used in a manufacturing company, is that the plans are handed over to the experts who specify the procedures to make the product and draw it. Consistent designing and planning require the knowledge of manufacturing processes and experience. This paper focuses on the problem of the design of foundry models. This is the first step of a project for the complete CAPP implementation in foundry companies. The main objective is the realisation of a computer aided system to help, automatically select and finally define the foundry models parameters. In the applied methodology, the steps are divided into three parts: knowledge acquisition, the activity modelisation and finally development and implementation of the tool. The software tool used for the prototype system is an object-oriented programming language: The Visual Basic. The analysis of a case study have drawn to the reduction in processing times and errors and to a more engineered design.