Available as NIST IR 5713, CS-TR-3404, UMIACS-TR-95-08,ISR-TR-95-14. In the marketplace of the 21st century, there is no place for traditional \over-the-wall " communications between design and manufacturing. In order to \design it right the very rst time," designers must ensure that their products are both functional and easy to manufacture. Software tools have had some successes in reducing the barriers between design and manufacturing. Manufacturability analysis systems are emerging as one such tool|enabling identi cation of potential manufacturing problems during the design phase and providing suggestions to designers on how to eliminate them. In this paper, we provide a survey of current state of the art in automated manufacturability

In recent years, growing ecological concern has prompted for `design for environment'. One way to achieve this is to design products that are easy to disassemble, because this improves the ability to reuse or recycle parts of a product. This paper presents a computational theory for product modeling and reasoning about product disassembly. This theory, implemented in the PROMOD system, is based on an ontology of different connection types between product components. For the task of reasoning about disassembly, the standard topological relation that expresses that two objects are connected or in contact proves to be inadequate. We therefore introduce, within a topological context, a small number of new ontological primitives concerning the rigidness of connections and the constrained degrees of freedom, which in effect are task-oriented abstractions of geometric and physical-chemical properties of products. On this basis, it is demonstrated that one can automatically ...

: Consumer products are deployed from market-in stage through growing-up stage to maturated stage by gradually shifting their appealing features from fundamental functions to supplemental value-addition over their life stages. This paper investigates the underlying design patterns in such product deployment toward revealing design knowledge with wider and longer visions. After the analysis procedure is organized by combining quality function deployment (QFD), cost-and-worth assessment in value engineering and cost estimation methods, design changes across three different vacuum cleaners for Japanese market in the last three decades are investigated as an example case. The gotten empirical results indicate the possibility in articulating design knowledge for efficient product definition toward design deployment across life stages. Key words: Product Design, Design Engineering, Product Definition, QFD, Value Engineering, Life Stage 1 INTRODUCTION Design of consumer products suc...

Assembly-oriented CAD has long been accepted as a necessary development from the current componentfocused solid modelling systems. It is proposed that such an environment should incorporate assembly sequence generation and Design for Assembly (DFA) analyses to assist the designer, including some automatic inference to facilitate ease of use. The key to enabling the various assembly analyses lies in interrogation of the CAD model and this poses some interesting challenges in the field of geometric reasoning. Statistics from case studies show that, in particular, the identification of part symmetry and principal axes is fundamental to many of the required algorithms which have been identified. This paper reviews methods for symmetry detection. However, no pre-existing method suitable for this application is found and so a new technique is proposed which exploits the existence of loops within the CAD model. This entails the comparison of loop areas to discover exact symmetry, par...

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This paper proposes an assessment method for value distribution across a series of products within a product family. The maturation of society makes the life styles of individuals diverse. Such change demands the manufacturing firms the distributed integrity of a family of products from simple models to luxurious ones. The method aims to facilitate the establishment of product definitions over a product family. In the method, first the variety of customer’s requirements is translated into a chained definition of required worth of respective modules and parts across products through value engineering techniques and quality function deployment, which are based on categorization of customer attributes, the standardized patterns of their distribution and switching mechanism in value propagation. Second the manufacturing cost is estimated on respective modules and parts across products through systematic utilization of design-for-X methodologies, in which the scale and cost of functional modules are assumed using the similarity laws of physical systems. Then the absolute levels of both worth and cost of all modules over different products are contrasted over the cost-worth graph. Tendency of their balances and expansion patterns reveals the controversial points of a chained product definition of a product family. The method is applied to the design analysis of three refrigerators with different capacities.

The main goal of this dissertation proposal is to develop concepts and methodologies towards the automation of the manufacturability analysis of robot-made assemblies of electro-mechanical devices during the design stage. The basic research hypothesis is that developing an integrative tool to answer each one of the questions involved in the manufacturability analysis can give competitive advantage to the manufacturing enterprises. First, a general review of the related fields is introduced. Then, the envisioned system and the work already done to develop it is described in detail. Finally, the expected contributions of this work are presented.