Design Concurrent Calculation: A CAD- and Data-integrated Approach

Apart from functional aspects, product design requires increasingly more issues to be taken into consideration. Quality alone cannot suffice to compete in current markets; design for manufacturability, for assembly, for recycling, etc., are well-known concepts. These can largely be reduced to the necessity of design for costs. This paper focuses on a CAD-based approach to design concurrent calculation. It will discuss how well-established tools like feature technology, knowledge-based systems and relational databases can be blended into one coherent concept to achieve an entirely CAD- and data-integrated cost information tool. This system is able to extract data from the CAD system, combine it with company-specific information about manufacturing capabilities, and, subsequently, autonomously evaluate manufacturability aspects and costs of the given CAD model. Within minutes the designer can obtain quantitative information about the major cost sources. Additionally, neural networks and local weighted regression are introduced as two alternative methods for approximating manufacturing times from empirical data.