The development of a computerized process planning system requires a comprehensive description of the workpiece in terms of geometry and form elements, so that a sufficiently detailed workpiece model is required. The classification code is the logical tool for breaking up the workpiece spectrum into input data to be analysed by digital computers.
The fulfillment of the complete automation of the process planning can be achieved through the computerization of all the involved activities. All the reviewed automated process planning systems are based on manual workpiece classification and coding. The work presented in this paper is concentrated on the development of a computer aided workpiece classificationand coding method which can be used in any automated process planning system.