Defining specialized design similarity measures

Similar product designs resemble each other and have similar attributes and characteristics. When examining a product design to create its process pla n, design its fixture, or estimate its manufacturing cost, manufacturing en gineers often identify one or more similar products that the factory has ma nufactured in the past. They may do this from memory, from a file cabinet, or from a database (in a product data management system). Then, they retrie ve the process plan (or fixture or cost estimate) for the similar product a nd modify it for the new product. Manufacturing and process planning expert s use a complex set of rules, guidelines, and other knowledge to determine how similar two products are. Computer-aided process planning tools, howeve r, generally use simpler, less sophisticated procedures for determining sim ilarity. These traditional procedures may be inappropriate for specific set tings. This paper presents an approach for developing function-specific des ign similarity measures. Such a measure explicitly exploits the specific ne ed for similar products and thus improves variant approaches for process pl anning, fixture planning, and manufacturability evaluation. The approach is applied to a specific fixture planning domain.