An XML-based machining energy estimation tool from process plans

Excessive energy consumption has become a worldwide issue in today's manufacturing industry. Software tools for estimating manufacturing energy consumption that could later be used to integrate with CAD/CAM systems are in demand. This research develops software tools for estimating manufacturing energy consumption in machining operations based on manufacturing process plans. This study first reviews literature and background in related areas and then presents the method to calculate manufacturing energy in machining operations. eXtended Markup Language (XML) has been adopted as the knowledge representation language for machining process plans and forms one of the inputs for energy estimation. Since XML plays an important role in estimating machining energy, this article introduces XML validation and parsing. The method is demonstrated via case studies for machining energy estimation in machining operations. The method will assist users who have little knowledge about energy computations to estimate energy consumption during the manufacturing phase. Such energy estimation can be used to redesign the part and assemblies, leading to products with reduced machining energy.