A Methodology for Operations Planning

The key to successful manufacturing of complicated geometry in numerically controlled machines lies in the control and quality of operations planning. This thesis presents a methodology for automated operations planning for milling with five axes. The goal in this research has been to develop a methodology to achieve complicated machining faster than today.
The result is a methodology that uses planning ideas from manufacturing process planning and surrounding research areas such as the generative approach, the variant approach and expert systems that are normally used in automatic systems.
This methodology uses a human operations planner to put predefined operations planning structures in the right places in a complicated operations plan. In this way the presented methodology is a semi-automatic approach, since it uses a human as the expert.
The methodology has continuously been tested and developed in different real-life cases. The three different products that are subject for these tests are presented herein. It is three different products with certain differences and similarities. The products operations planning has been made more efficient by using this methodology in three slightly different ways adapted to the current situation.