A knowledge-based manufacturing and cost evaluation system for product design/re-design

Gao, James and Sharma , R. (2007) A knowledge-based manufacturing and cost evaluation system for product design/re-design. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 33 (9-10). pp. 856-865. ISSN 0268-3768

Abstract

Various research studies have concluded that most new design projects are actually re-design activities. This re-design may be for improvement or for reprovision of existing products. Most research efforts for providing
computer tools for supporting conceptual or early design
mainly concentrated on the design of new products. In
practice manufacturing plans generated when an order was
placed may quickly become out-dated as the manufacturing
environment and constraints often change. It is therefore
equally important to regenerate manufacturing plans and
re-evaluate design every time a product is changed, redesigned or reordered. This project focuses on manufacturability analysis and provides re-design support for conceptual design of discrete single-piece mechanical
parts with emphasis on machined processes. This limitation
of implementing the prototype system for re-design
activities is not a system design or methodology restriction. The condition has been imposed by the authors as a prelude to validating the system and its results. A novel hybrid approach using a combination of sequential flowchart logic and an expert system has been developed which uses a user-defined feature tree as the input for its analysis. The system allows the designer to estimate manufacturability according to criteria of time and cost, and also to explore different scenarios of parametric variation in the design. A case study has been presented to validate the system’s practicality and usefulness.

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