GENERATING REDESIGN SUGGESTIONS TO REDUCE SETUP COST - A STEP TOWARDSAUTOMATED REDESIGN

All mechanical designs pass through a series of formal and informal re design steps, involving the analysis of functionality, manufacturabili ty, cost and other life-cycle factors. The speed and efficacy of these steps has a major influence on the lead time of the product from conc eptualization to launching. In this paper we propose a methodology for automatically generating redesign suggestions for reducing setup cost s for machined parts. Given an interpretation of the design as a colle ction of machinable features, our approach is to generate alternate ma chining features by making geometric changes to the original features, and add them to the feature set of the original part to create an ext ended feature set. The designer may provide restrictions on the design indicating the type and extent of modifications allowed on certain fa ces and volumes, in which case all redesign suggestions generated by o ur approach honour those restrictions. By taking combinations of featu res from the extended feature set generated above, we can generate mod ified versions of the original design that still satisfy the designer' s intent. By considering precedence constraints, we can estimate the s etup time that will be required for each design. Any modified design w hose setup time is less than that of the original design can be presen ted to the designer as a possible way to modify the original design. C opyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd