1.1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter is intended to give the reader a perspective for the research issues in CAPP. It will begin with a discussion of modeling process plans and designs. Then it will discuss a number of approaches to process planning. The chapter will finally conclude with brief descriptions of other CAPP systems. If the reader desires more extensive descriptions than presented here, then they are directed to other publications [Chang and Wysk, 1985][Wang and Wysk, 1988][Chang, 1990][Alting and Zhang, 1988][Requicha and Vandenbrande, 1988]. More advanced research directions in CAPP were discussed by Ham and Lu [1988, 1989], and ElMaraghy [1993].