Abstract
Advanced CAD design tools that facilitate designers to produce manufacturable designs right the first time are needed to compress product realization cost and time. Such tools must facilitate artifact diagnosis regarding its manufacturability during early design stages. This study focuses on identifying the major issues in the development of a knowledge-based design tool to evaluate artifact manufacturability. A prototype integrated design and manufacturing (IDM) system has been developed for conducting machined part evaluation. The IDM system is implemented on a SunSparc 20 workstation using the ACIS v1.7 geometric modeler, the C++ programming language, and MOTIF. The concepts of feature flexibility and feature importance introduced in this study can be used to provide appropriate context-sensitive “intelligent” repair (redesign) advice to the designer after identifying portions of a design artifact that are difficult/impossible to manufacture. A preliminary discussion on the issue of ranking of redesign solutions based on designer’s objective functions is also presented.
Multifunctional materials: concepts, function-structure relationships, knowledge-based design, translational materials research