INTELLIGENT REASONING ASSISTANT FOR INCORPORATING MANUFACTURABILITY ISSUES INTO THE DESIGN PROCESS

This paper describes an integrated Intelligent Reasoning Assistant (IR A) as an approach to incorporate manufacturability issues into the des ign process. By using a series of pre-established geometric features a vailable from a CAD system and manufacturing knowledge captured from e xperienced design and manufacturing personnel, the proposed model is u sed to recommend feasible manufacturing process sequences and design c hanges that enhance design manufacturability early in the conceptual d esign stage. The used Design For Manufacturing (DFM) approach assumes that incorporating manufacturing issues into the design process is not a serial decision method, rather; it is a process with multiple paral lel interactions from origination of a conceptual design to direct lin kage with manufacturing parameters. Although the emphasis of this rese arch has been focused on part designs which are metal machining intens ive, it is believed that the described approach can be generalized to other manufacturing environments. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd