IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, VOL.10 No.2, February 2010 148 Manuscript received February 5, 2010 Manuscript revised February 20, 2010 Virtual Cutting Tool Management System for Milling Process Haslina Arshad † , Rosilah Hassan †† , Nazlia Omar †† and Shahnorbanun Sahran † , † Department of Industrial Computing, †† Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Information Science and Technology Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia Summary Information of cutting tools is very important for the effectiveness of cutting process. Previously, traditional search methods by referring to the catalogues for the right cutting tool has been a burden to the user. As a result, the probabilities of choosing the wrong cutting tools were high. In this work, a new cutting tools management system for milling process has been developed for training students before they actually perform the milling process. With the specific parameters such as cutter type, part number, dimension and material types and its properties, the user can easily get detail information of the cutting tools such as cutter dimension, insert types and its properties. User can also visualize the chosen cutter and inserts interactively. This web application will help the user to find the best cutting tools. It can also help to educate students or any users in understanding the process of choosing the best cutting tools and the parameters needed for the cutting process. Key words: virtual cutting tools, database system, milling process 1. Introduction Selection process of cutting tools is important and critical in any machining processes. The selection process will require the knowledge of cutting parameters, types of workpiece materials and capability of the machine tools. The wrong choice of cutting tools might lead to a big loss to a company in terms of the time and cost spent in searching for the right tools. This research was done in order to help users of milling machine who have faced problems finding appropriate cutting tools based on the manual catalogue provided by the cutting tools manufacturer. Some of the problems are to find the types of cutting tool material and to specify the right cutting tools for specific workpiece material as they have to go through page by page of the catalogue to find the result. Apart from that, this manual process also might take up a lot of time. The manual process might lead to the wrong choice of the cutting tools due to human error especially when cross-references had to be done between several catalogues. On the other hand, the manual catalogue provided by the manufacturer is limited to single user only and when more than one user needs to use the catalogue at the same time the problem will surface. This will be a waste of time that could delay the whole cutting process and eventually the lead time of the whole process. Fast and accurate access to information about available manufacturing resources and data is critical to reducing production cost and maximizing machine productivity [1]. Problems also arise when new cutting tools for milling process are introduced to the market. This might take a long time for the manufacturer to amend the information in the old catalogue and produce the new one. Hence, the up-to-date information did not reach the customer or manufacturer at the right time. In this paper, a virtual cutting tool management system is introduced to reduce or eventually solve many of the problems mentioned before. It has the capability of choosing the right cutting tool from a virtual cutting tool catalogue. The cutting tool can be visualized in 3D using Virtual Reality technique. By doing this, we can actually help the user to search for the right cutting tools and also provide them the clear image of the chosen cutter. We also presented the visualization of milling process and how the right cutter is fed into the milling machine for cutting purpose. 2. Related work Cutting tool management is very important and a lot of research and information system had been developed. Ebrahim and Chao-Liang [2] have highlighted the needs for cutting tool database management in FMS and the requirements for successful cutting tool database. They presented a systematic way to design and develop a relational cutting tool database. The developed cutting tool database is implemented using ORACLE database management system. There are several significant issues which are suitable to successful FMS development. These