Feature of Xplano

• Knowledge, information and data management
  Manage relevant knowledge, information and data from product design to manufacturing.
• Extract Feature-based information from CAD models written in ISO STEP format
  Automaticly extraction of manufacturing features from CAD models written in standard STEP format to integrate CAD and CAM.
• Specialiced 3D Viewer for Process Planning
• Intelligent reasoning for automated generation of Process Plans.
  Provide a Knowledge base and a Resource base for the Rreasoning Process for generating company specific process plans.

Innovative Aspects

The Xplano system contains three major innovative features:

• 1. The inclusion of a 3D viewer for CAD files which is optimised for process planning applications, a product not available in the market before now.
• 2. The Knowledge Base is a database containing a set of rules detailing all of the previously entered instructions on how to produce given manufacturing features, retaining the work done in previous process planning exercises. This means that the same problems do not have to be solved repeatedly for different items - once the most suitable manufacturing method for a given feature has been determined, the system will retain that knowledge, even if the original planner leaves.
• 3. Most importantly, the system has the ability to generate an outline process plan automatically, working from the manufacturing feature based description it generates from the CAD file. Combined with the Knowledge Base and Resource Base, the system uses rule based reasoning to produce an optimised process plan. This can be modified and improved at all stages of the reasoning process by the human operator.