Adequacy of machining features for describing machining jobs

In machining, a piece of material called the raw stock is subjected to a succession of cuts until it reaches the finished state. In feature-based machining, the cuts made are classified as machining features. Several attempts have been made by researchers to define a set of machining features. The set of features defined by ISO 10303-224 is the only independent one outside commercial CAD packages. Expert Machinist, a module in the Pro/Engineer suite defines another such set. However, their adequacy to define each product shape has not been investigated. This present paper studies the machining features (three-axis milling machining features) defined by Expert Machinist to investigate adequacy of the set for describing every product shape. A heuristic approach has been taken by studying 62 components with differing complexities. The results show that the features indeed were adequate to define this relatively small sample of components.