Automated Manufacturability Evaluation of Sheet Metal Components: A Review

Accounting for manufacturability considerations at the product design stage is not only important but earlier they are considered in the design cycle, better it is. When computers are used extensively for design and manufacturing, automated manufacturability evaluation is a powerful option. This paper presents a review on automated manufacturability evaluation of sheet metal parts. While a large number of technical papers including reviews have been published on the general subject of Design For Manufactuarability (DFM), there is no paper in the literature that provides a review of automated manufacturability evaluation of sheet metal parts. In this work existing automated manufacturability evaluation systems for sheet metal parts are reviewed. The product, process and resource information models together with integration issues for automated manufacturability evaluation are discussed. Some of the future research challenges in this area are presented at the end.