INTEGRATING DFM WITH CAD THROUGH DESIGN CRITIQUING

The increasing focus on design for manufacturability (DFM) in research in concurrent engineering and engineering design is expanding the sco pe of traditional design activities in order to identify and eliminate manufacturing problems during the design stage. Manufacturing a produ ct generally involves many different kinds of manufacturing activities , each having different characteristics. A design that is good for one kind of activity may not be good for another; for example, a design t hat is easy to assemble may not be easy to machine. One obstacle to DF M is the difficulty involved in building a single system that can hand le the various manufacturing domains relevant to a design. In this pap er we propose an architecture for integrating CAD with DFM. As the des igner creates a design, multiple critiquing systems analyze its manufa cturability with respect to different manufacturing domains such as ma chining, fixturing, assembly and inspection. Using this analysis, each critiquing system offers advice about potential ways of improving the design and an integration module mediates conflicts among the differe nt critiquing systems in order to provide feedback to improve the over all design. We anticipate that this approach can be used to build a mu lti-domain environment that will allow designers to create higher-qual ity products that can be more economically manufactured. This will red uce the need for redesign and reduce product cost and lead time.