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Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) is one of the most important advances in the area of manufacturing engineering which plays a critical role, linking Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) activities. CAPP determines automatically the use of available resources, including machines, cutting inserts, holders, appropriate machining parameters such as cutting speed, feed rate, depth of cut, and generates automatic sequences of operations and instructions to convert a raw material into a required product with good surface finish. The production cost of a manufacturing component depends upon cost of workpiece material, tooling cost, and recurring expenses. Thus, it is clear that the only scope to reduce the overall cost of a workpiece is to focus on the tooling cost and machining time. Selecting an optimum insert, optimum cutting conditions, and optimum sequencing of operations affect directly the workpiece cost. The main aim of this paper is to select from recent cutting data of world's leading manufacturer tools Sandvik Coromant, adequate cutters, optimal inserts, and optimal cutting conditions for prismatic manufacturing features, extracted by a feature recognizer module that we developed earlier, and which takes STEP file as input to the system. The final objective of this work consists in generating an optimal process plan defined according to ISO 14649.
