[step-manufacturing] Minutes of the September 23 conference call

[Martin Hardwick]

Attendees
Martin Hardwick, STEP Tools, USA
David Loffredo, STEP Tools, USA
Vincent Marchini, Ameritech, USA
Aydin Nassehi, University of Bath, UK
Bob Erickson, Pratt & Whitney, USA
Mikael Hedlind, KTH, Sweden
Fred Proctor, NIST, USA
Ronnie Fesperman, NIST, USA
David Odendahl, Boeing, USA
Sid Venkatesh, Boeing, USA
Larry Maggiano, Mitutoyo, USA,
Bengt Olsson, Sandvik, Sweden
Alain Brail, Airbus (retired), France

We discussed the results of the survey. There were several issues with 
the titles given to the different categories and unbalanced responses 
from different organizations.  Nevertheless the results of the survey 
were quite interesting and another one may be held with new questions.

The discussion then moved on to a framework proposed by Alain Brail.

ftp://ftp.steptools.com/private/Undecided/CONTRIBUTION_TO_STANDARDISATION.ppt

The goal of the framework as shown in Slide 3 is to let industry 
describe 'What" and for a control of the future to decide "How".  The 
"What" should be higher level and more abstract than the interface 
currently supported by G codes. The "How" can continue to be G code or 
similar provided there is an automatic and deterministic way to convert 
the "What" into the "How" with zero or minimal user input.

For example, to manufacture an aerospace part industry might determine 
that three operations are necessary because of a thin wall. The What 
would be a description of the three operations with the volumes to be 
removed and any constraints (PMI) that must be met by before or after 
the operations. The How would then be determined by the Controller using 
its knowledge of the available resources (machines and cutting tools).  
The How might be expressed as machine independent tool paths and one way 
to implement the framework is to create a system that converts STEP-NC 
CC4 data (operations plus tolerances) into STEP-NC CC1 data (operations 
plus tool paths).

The presentation led to widespread discussion. David Odendahl observed 
that OMAC has been developing a set of machine independent operations 
for milling and tapping holes. Martin Hardwick observed that the 
framework has some similarities to the framework used to implement 
PostScript in the early days when Universities and similar organizations 
put servers onto their systems to convert postscript into printed 
documents on as many printers as possible. When the postscript framework 
became popular the printer vendors added software to process the 
postscript directly and the end result was a framework that could be 
used for printing by many different document publishing systems.

Several participants suggested that  the framework implements generative 
NC for STEP-NC and that we should consider including the NIST developed 
EMC2 control in the framework.

Lastly it was suggested that Aydin should develop some slides to give 
more detail to the framework and that Fred should develop some slides to 
show possible roles for EMC2 in the framework.

A recording of this conference call is on the ftp site.  The next 
conference call will be at the regular times on October 7.

ftp://ftp.steptools.com/private/Undecided/stepmanuf_telecon_20110923.wmv


Martin Hardwick
Team Leader