Assisting designers in the forecasting of surfaces used for easier fixturing in a machining process

Constraints concerning the manufacturing of product parts must be integrated 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 order to facilitate the integration of machining facilities into a group of designers, computer tools have been developed by the research team: those tools have to assist the designers and be as close as possible to the tools they usually use. Here two types of tools are presented to solve this problem: the first integrates manufacturing tools in a computer-aided design environment and has already been developed in the author's laboratory, the second adds manufacturing constraints to the design process and is today under development in the laboratory. A computer module for determining machining fixturing of a part is given as an example of the first tool type. It manages both geometrical relationships and parameters and part and fixture behaviour. In the case of the second type, the information, that has to be fed back to the designer, is discussed. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science S.A.