DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A DESIGN FOR PRODUCIBILITY METHOD FOR PRECISION PLANAR STAMPED PRODUCTS

In this paper, we establish the Design for Producibility Design Development Methodology for stamped products which integrates both the design and manufacture of the stamped product. The general concept of considering manufacturing techniques at the initial design stages, often termed Design for Manufacturability, is certainly not novel. However, the proper, implementation of this concept is not so widely understood. Our proposed method permits the product designer to control both product functionality (which he has incorporated into an initial design) and subsequent manufacturing costs through an iterative re-design process. The key step in this method is the mapping scheme from the final product design domain to the manufacturing domain; this scheme captures the cause-effect relations between design (and thus functional) specifications and manufacturing requirements and costs. We also describe the implementation of the design methodology in a knowledge-based computer environment called the Producibility Evaluation Package (P.E.P.) that, as a result of the design methodology, also automatically generates much of the process plan.