Reduction of product development cycle time is a major concern in industries for achieving competitive advantage. The focus of industries has shifted from traditional product development methodology to accelerated or rapid fabrication techniques. Rapid Prototyping (RP) is the quickest, and can reproduce very complex shapes. With no up-front tooling costs, it can be inexpensive as long as only a few parts are needed. Despite its popularity, traditional Investment Casting (IC) suffers from high tooling investments for producing wax patterns. IC is prohibitively expensive for low-volume production typical in prototyping, customized or specialized component productions.
Abstract
As Rapid prototyping processes start delivering production quality parts, the demand for low volume manufacturing is increasing. This paper explores the performance of an SDM cell for volume production of one-of-a-kind parts. The SDM process is modeled from an operations perspective and a queuing network that implements the process simulated. On this simulated cell, a number of scheduling policies are evaluated and their results analyzed for cycle time performance and variability.
Smart Platform for Rapid Prototyping: A First Solution Approach to Improve Time-to-Market and Process Control in Low-Volume Device Fabrication