Evaluation of toolpath quality: User-assisted CAM for complex milling processes

Complex machining technologies such as simultaneous five-axis milling become increasingly significant for today's production industry. Although most existing CAM systems support planning engineers to design these processes, they do not assist in evaluating the quality of resulting NC programmes concerning given objectives. Therefore, a new approach – presented in this paper – has been developed for identifying potentially critical areas of planned five-axis toolpaths as part of a user-assisting CAM system. It is based on aggregating data to information by combining domain-specific knowledge elements and concepts of expert systems in inference networks. These networks compute coefficients along the toolpath giving the user an intuitive idea whether errors corresponding to the employed networks are to be expected at these locations.