Towards automated work plan generation for the manufacturing of metal components

Manufacturing planning is currently characterised by increased part-specific planning costs and manual, experience-based derivation of process chains. With the increasing geometric complexity of components, established planning activities are increasingly reaching their limits. This paper presents a framework for automated work plan generation, focusing on the growing complexity of assessing the intuitive manufacturability of parts. Due to the organisational challenges of current work planning, there is a need to further develop subjective and manual processes into analytically objective, automated, and data-supported solutions. Based on expert interviews conducted with 11 companies classified as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), a systematic derivation of technological requirements for digital support is presented. A generative and voxel-based approach is introduced as a potential solution for digital support in work planning. This approach corresponds to the derived requirements and initially deals with the basic modelling of the system components.