TY - JOUR AB - Purpose Three-dimensional digital design and manufacturing technology are changing the current manufacturing pattern and have become the core of enterprise competition. However, the research and application of three-dimensional digital technology in the present phase have a strong bias toward the design of three-dimensional model and focus little on process planning. It restricts the development of manufacturing industry. Therefore, this paper aims to present a design scheme of three-dimensional digital process planning.Design/methodology/approach A three-dimensional digital process design method is developed by combining model-based definition technology and knowledge engineering technology. Model-based definition technology is used to display the process information. And knowledge engineering technology is used for process decision; meanwhile, ontology technology is introduced to describe process knowledge. And taking shaft part as an example, this paper establishes the general ontology of manufacturing process and the special ontology of shaft. This research provides an available method for the three-dimensional digital process planning.Findings Traditional process planning mainly is based on two-dimensional engineering drawing, which leads to the low efficiency and quality of process planning. Moreover, it cannot achieve effective mining and management of knowledge. Thus, applying an effective knowledge management technology into a three-dimensional process system is necessary.Research limitations/implications This paper contributes to an available method for three-dimensional digital process planning.Originality/value The introduction of model-based definition technology makes process information display in three-dimensional environment. And ontology technology achieves sematic reference and efficient management of process knowledge. VL - 47 IS - 4 SN - 0368-492X DO - 10.1108/K-05-2017-0170 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/K-05-2017-0170 AU - Zhu Haihua AU - Li Jing PY - 2018 Y1 - 2018/01/01 TI - Research on three-dimensional digital process planning based on MBD T2 - Kybernetes PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 816 EP - 830 Y2 - 2024/04/24 ER -