The current trends of product customization and repair of high value parts with individual defects demand automation and a high degree of flexibility of the involved manufacturing process chains. To determine the corresponding requirements this paper gives an overview of manufacturing process chains by distinguishing between horizontal and vertical process chains. The established way of modeling and programming processes with CAx systems and existing approaches is shown. Furthermore, the different types of possible adaptions of a manufacturing process chain are shown and considered as a cascaded control loop. Following this it is discussed which key requirements of repair process chains are unresolved by existing approaches. To overcome the deficits this paper introduces repair features which comprise the idea of geometric features and defines analytical auxiliary geometries based on the measurement input data. This meets challenges normally caused by working directly on reconstructed geometries in the form of triangulated surfaces which are prone to artifacts. Embedded into function blocks, this allows the use of traditional approaches for manufacturing process chains to be applied to adaptive repair process chains

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In many industries the focus in CAx based manufacturing has changed from fixed process chains to ones which can adapt to dynamic inputs. This way process chains can take measurement data into account to produce optimal results. Unfortunately, existing approaches do not integrate well with the existing CAx systems since they do not ensure that existing processes will be kept unchanged. This restriction leads to a low adaption rate in some industries. Especially in the aerospace industry every change in the manufacturing processes will result in high costs. In this paper it is shown that an extended function block approach can be integrated with existing CAx systems while allowing the modeling and controlling of adaptive process chains with reduced data loss at the same time. In order to achieve this goal, data port manifests are introduced which announce supported data formats and features of the corresponding function block. This extension reduces information loss at system interfaces and helps to ensure that required data will be transferred between function blocks. A case study will show how this extension can be used in a common CAx system