STEP-NC compliant manufacturing cost estimation system for CNC milled part component

Abstract. Manufacturers depend on cost estimation system, at the early stage of product development, to supports engineers decision on design alternatives toward reducing final product cost. Lack of detail information about a product and its manufacture to generate fast and accurate cost estimate is a critical challenge in integrated manufacturing environment today. Most cost estimation systems relies on expert opinion and nominal information about the product to generate cost estimate of questionable accuraccy. High level integration of cost estimation system with manufacturer' other computer aided systems for seamless exchange of actual design and process information about a product can potentially improve the accuraccy of cost estimate. However, each computer aided system, including current integrated cost estimation systems, uses vendorspecific programming for unidirectional communication with other manufacturere systems. This hinders seamless flow of actual information about the product that is require for fast and accurate cost estimation during product development. Implementation of a vendor-neutral communication language will facilitate bidirectional sharing of quality information for interoperability and accurate cost estimate. In this paper the evolving ISO 14649 standard (STEP-NC) is implement as a vendor-neutral mediun for high level integration of estimation system with other computer aided systems for fast and accurate cost estimation.