Abstract
During the product development stage, designers often face the task of partitioning a product into functioning parts. Unfortunately, most decomposition decisions are made based on product functionality while the product manufacturability is usually ignored. As a result, the resulting parts can be too expensive to manufacture or sometimes impossible to make.
In this paper, we present a systematic approach to help designers decompose sheet-metal products. This approach is primarily driven by product manufacturability. It takes into account the manufacturability of sheet metal cutting, bending and assembly processes, while trying to minimize the number of parts. To overcome the combinatorial nature of the decomposition problem, a develop-first-decompose-later strategy is used. The decomposition goes back and forth between the design and decomposition modules to achieve sub-optimal results. The decomposition results are sent to the corresponding process planners and a complete production plan is produced.
A prototype system has been developed to demonstrate the proposed approach. Several decomposition examples are also presented.
