Practice and development of machine tool slide-unit selection system based on Access

XIAO Xia1， SHI Tie-zheng2， XIU Shi-chao3
（1. Designing Department， Yida Nippei Machine Tool Corporation， Dalian 116023， China；
2. R&D Institute， Dalian Crane & Mining Machinery Co.， Ltd.， Dalian 116036， China；
 3. School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation， Northeastern University， Shenyang 110819， China）

Abstract： Aiming at solving the problems of an inefficient and mistakable method to select slide-unit types for machine tool design in machine tool manufacturers by searching and reusing the relevant technique information from universal slide unit specifications and their bills of materials manually，the machine tool slide-unit selection system based on Microsoft Access was investigated. After the analysis of the slide unit type selection task and the hardware and software condition as well as the information management level of the company，the relationships between "designing requirements for slide-unit" and "universal slide-unit specifications"，and those between "slide-units' bills of materials"，were established. A method was presented to select the slide-unit type by means of the Access database. The slide-unit type selection model was evaluated on the efficiency and accuracy. The type selection system for more than 100 slide-units concerning several projects was tested. The experimental results indicate that this system can record the slide unit production history，automatically create "advice for starting production"，"wearing parts of slide unit" and other design or production documents and other statistical reports， which reduces intensity of labor and artificial errors and improves working efficiency. It also indicates that this system can help the company to build a knowledge base for later reference and provide a reliable data base for the machine tool digital design.
Key words： machine tool slide unit；type selection；database；technical information management；Access