Integrated manufacturing features and Design-for-manufacture guidelines for reducing product cost under CAD/CAM environment

The main contribution of the work is to develop an intelligent system for manufacturing features in the area of CAD/CAM. It brings the design and manufacturing phase together in design stage and provides an intelligent interface between design and manufacturing data by developing a library of features. The library is called manufacturing feature library which is linked with commercial CAD/CAM software package named Creo Elements/Pro by toolkit. Inside the library, manufacturing features are organised hierarchically. A systematic database system also have been developed and analysed for each feature consists of parameterised geometry, manufacturing information (including machine tool, cutting tools, cutting conditions, cutting fluids and recommended tolerances and surface finishing values, etc.), design limitations, functionality guidelines, and Design-for-manufacture guidelines. The approach has been applied in two case studies in which a rotational part (shaft) and a non-rotational part are designed through manufacturing features. Therefore, from manufacturing feature library a design can compose entirely in a bottom-up manner using manufacturable entities in the same way as they would be produced during the manufacturing phase. Upon insertion of a feature, the system ensures that no functionality or manufacturing guidelines are violated. The designers are warned if they attempt to include features that violate Design-for-manufacture and Design functionality guidelines. If a feature is modified, the system validates the feature by making sure that it remains consistent with its original functionality and Design-for-manufacture guidelines are re-applied. The system will be helped the process planner/manufacturing engineer by automatically creating work-piece data structure. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.