A Progressive design and manufacturing evaluation system incorporating STEP AP224

Most of the important cost related design decisions are taken in the early design stages. More often than not, designers have little or no knowledge of the manufacturing difficulties. Therefore, a design engineer typically designs components without consideration for manufacturing difficulties. This paper describes a product data management (PDM) based system for manufacturing evaluation and analysis in the early design stages. The system is based on a process planning system and an embedded expert system to resolve the abstract data usually associated with the early design stages. The system will allow early measurement of design in terms of time, manufacturing cost and resources. Early measurement of design would be especially helpful in supporting new design techniques like simultaneous design and concurrent engineering. The system is being developed in industrial collaboration with LSC Group, UK, which is a pioneering company in the field of automated process planning using STEP (standard for exchange of product data) AP224 standard.

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