Evolutionary trends in generative process planning

Varying degrees of integration of CAD and CAM have been achieved through the automation of the process planning function. The objective of this paper is to survey a class of such automated process planning systems, namely the generative process planning systems, with the intention of determining where we stand on our road to achieving total integration in its true sense. The survey reveals that the degree of integration achieved is directly proportional to the degree of informational completeness of the system representation employed. A novel system representation scheme suitable for dynamic process selection procedures is proposed.