Process planning is a task comprising a broad range of activities to design and develop an appropriate manufacturing process for producing a part. Interpretation of the part design, selection of manufacturing processes, definition of operations, operation sequences, machining datums, geometrical dimensions and tolerances are some common activities associated with the task. Process planning is also “the link between product design and manufacturing” with the supplementary commission to support design of competitive products.

Process planning is of a complex and dynamic nature, often managed by a skilled person with few, or no, explicit methods to solve the task. The work is heuristic and the result is depending on personal experiences and decisions. Since decades, there have been plenty of attempts to develop systems for computer-aided process planning (CAPP). CAPP is still awaiting its breakthrough and one reason is the gap between the functionality of the CAPP systems and the industrial process planning practice.

This thesis has an all-embracing aim of finding methods that cover essential activities for process planning, including abilities to predict the outcome of a proposed manufacturing process. This is realised by gathering supporting methods suitable to manage both qualitative and quantitative characterisation and analyses of a manufacturing process.

The production research community has requested systematisation and deeper understanding of industrial process planning. This thesis contributes with a flow chart describing the process planning process (PPP), in consequence of the methodological studies. The flow chart includes process planning activities and information flows between these activities.

The research has been performed in an industrial environment for high volume manufacturing of gear parts. Though gear manufacturing has many distinctive features, the methods and results presented in this thesis are generally applicable to precision manufacturing of many kinds of mechanical parts.