ASSISTING DESIGNERS IN THE FORECASTING OF SURFACES USED FOR EASIER FIXTURING IN A MACHINING PROCESS

Constraints concerning the manufacturing of product parts must be inte grated as early as possible in the product-design process in order to reduce product costs. For this, a part of manufacturing knowledge must be at the designer's disposal all through the design process. In orde r to facilitate the integration of machining facilities into a group o f designers, computer tools have been developed by the research team: those tools have to assist the designers and be as close as possible t o the tools they usually use. Here two types of tools are presented to solve this problem: the first integrates manufacturing tools in a com puter-aided design environment and has already been developed in the a uthor's laboratory, the second adds manufacturing constraints to the d esign process and is today under development in the laboratory. A comp uter module for determining machining fixturing of a part is given as an example of the first tool type. It manages both geometrical relatio nships and parameters and part and fixture behaviour. In the case of t he second type, the information, that has to be fed back to the design er, is discussed. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science S.A.