Design for assembly: Influencing the design process

There is extensive evidence to suggest that industrial products are being designed with an excessive number of parts and, invariably, many more costly and complex assembly operations than should be the case. A feed forward or proactive approach to the application of Design for Assembly, aimed at influencing the design process to overcome these problems, is presented. This paper reports on progress towards the development of the Design for Assembly ‘Sandpit’, where Design for Assembly procedures are integrated with advanced computer-aided design concepts to realize an assembly-oriented design environment. A case study is included to help illustrate the ways in which the approach can be used in industry.

[1]  Geoffrey Boothroyd,et al.  Product design for manufacture and assembly , 1994, Comput. Aided Des..

[2]  Julian D Booker,et al.  Process Selection: From Design to Manufacture , 1997 .

[3]  Graham Jared,et al.  Assembly sequence structures in design for assembly , 1997, Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning (ISATP'97) - Towards Flexible and Agile Assembly and Manufacturing -.

[4]  K. G. Swift,et al.  Detection of symmetry and primary axes in support of proactive design for assembly , 1999, SMA '99.

[5]  K. G. Swift,et al.  Geometric reasoning and design for manufacture , 1994, Comput. Aided Des..