Manufacturing Evaluation of Designs: a Knowledge-based Approach

Manufacturing evaluation is performed with heuristics that are developed internally by the manufacturing experts in the company. Many of the existing manufacturing evaluation systems rely on highly specialized knowledge, extensive databases, and require a significant amount of time and cost that make these tools in general unavailable early in design and to small manufacturers who do not have this expertise. Oftentimes, the level of detail is unnecessarily precise. Useful results can be obtained at a more abstract level without the exact data required by existing systems. This research project is concerned with the modeling of the manufacturing capability process information and knowledge to support manufacturability evaluation of designs.