Abstract
This paper presents an approach to automate process planning of press dies for manufacturing of car bodies. Considering that the press-dies used at the same press operations regardless of the panels they produce or the car models of which they produce panels have similar shapes except for the forming part of the dies, general approaches to recognize manufacturing features from CAD models are not necessary. Therefore, a hybrid approach is proposed combining feature-based design and feature-extraction approaches. The proposed method recognizes features by parsing the parameters extracted from CAD models and finds proper operations by querying the database by the recognized features. An internet-based process planning system is developed to demonstrate the proposed approach and to suggest a new paradigm of process planning system that utilizes an internet access to the CAD system.