DEVELOPING AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR FEATURE-BASED EARLY MANUFACTURING COST ESTIMATION

The major objective of concurrent engineering is to consider the relat ed downstream manufacturing during the design stage. Estimating manufa cturing cost during the early design stage is one area that has been g iven little attention by researchers. However, if the product manufact uring cost can be estimated during the design stage, designers can mod ify a design to achieve proper performance as well as a reasonable cos t at an early stage of the product development process. Basically, man ufacturing cost is determined by shape complexity, product precision a nd tooling process. That is, if these dam can br obtained and consider ed during the design stage, estimating manufacturing cost during the e arl!: product development stage will become a feasible task. In this r esearch, a framework for-estimating the manufacturing of a feature-bas ed approach is proposed. tends to estimate the manufacturing cost of a design according to the shapes and precision of its features. The obj ective of this research is to provide a tool to assist a designer who has little knowledge about the manufacturing process, to estimate the fabrication cost of a design during its conceptual stage, in order to reduce unnecessary costs in the downstream process.