Knowledge-based manufacturability assessment: an object-oriented approach

To help the achievement of integrated product and process development, there is a need for tools that can assist designers in creating manufacturable parts with less design routines and tryouts. This paper presents a systematic approach to developing automated manufacturability assessment tools by identifying the functional and informational requirements and proposing an assessment model. The work presented in this paper includes: (1) identification of characteristics and tasks of design for the die-casting process; (2) determination of functional and informational requirements for automatic manufacturability assessment; (3) formalization and modularization of assessment knowledge; and (4) modeling of product definition data to support the assessment. Object-oriented techniques are employed to model the assessment knowledge and manage the complicated and diverse types of product definition data by taking advantage of data abstraction, modularity, inherent concurrence, and the concept of encapsulation and extendibility.