Abstract
This paper presents an approach to evaluating producibility intended to enhance the ability of engineers to quickly design low-cost and high-quality parts. We divide all production processes into two categories: trajectory-dominated processes in which a generic tool is moved in a trajectory to form the part-shape and process-physics-dominated processes in which shaped tools are used to form similarly shaped parts. We focus on process-physics-dominated processes and on producibility problems that arise because of part shape. We argue that, for these processes, the currently popular approach of representing parts as collections of geometric features is inappropriate for evaluating producibility. We propose an alternative approach and representation. Our approach consists of first identifying the different failure modes of the process and then defining producibility metrics corresponding to the likelihood of encountering each failure mode. This set of metrics is used to represent the degree to which a part is easily manufactured. Finally, we demonstrate this approach by developing a set of metrics for evaluating the producibility of aluminum extrusions. We use extrusions from the Boeing 777 to validate the metrics.
