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1. Introduction
Machining is the most flexible and precise manufacturing process during which designed part is created by cutting away material sequentially from an unfinished piece (Groover, 2010). It is usually the final process to achieve design tolerances impossible for other manufacturing processes. Even though the largest application of machining is in the metal working industry, the historical origins of almost every type of machining equipment and tool are in the woodworking and carpentry. The woodwork manufacturing is an important industry group in which the primary and secondary raw materials obtained from forestry are processed by enterprises of various sizes with different production technologies to manufacture items such as furniture, cabinets, carpentry and other wood products.
According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) (2017), in 2015 combined volume of manufacture of wood and of products of wood and cork, and manufacture of furniture was 4.8 percent of total world manufacturing value added, with 1.5 percent for the former and 3.3 percent for the latter. As a comparison, manufacture of motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers constitutes 8.1 percent and manufacture of textiles constitutes 2.4 percent share of the world manufacturing value added (UNIDO, 2017). Italian research and consulting company, the Centre for Industrial Studies (CSIL) (2017) reports that in 2017 the annual output of furniture industries of 100 countries is US$420bn.
For millennia, woodworking machines are controlled manually or mechanically, but as the advent of computer numerical control (CNC), woodworking machines proliferated across the globe for their capabilities, speed, precision and cost and labor advantages. One of the most common types of CNC woodworking machines is the flat table or nesting table CNC routers used in the processing of wood products for furniture production and cabinet making. CNC flat table routers are of a relatively simple design consisting of a base, a flat cutting table, a gantry that carry the cutting spindle, a linear drive system that drives the gantry along the flat table (x-axis), a linear drive system that drives the cutting along the gantry (y-axis), linear drive that drives the cutting tool in the spindle up and down (z-axis) and finally CNC system as shown in Figure 1.
The routing process begins with the attachment of...