Actually the activities of overall design must be well orchestrated and integrated which has led to the evolution of the philosophy of Concurrent Engineering where the decisions about different aspects related to the product's life cycle, must be considered simultaneously. However, when the full breadth of design for manufacture is considered there are many aspects that must be addressed. This leads to the need for information systems to be able to support multiple views of a product, where each view provides the appropriate representation to support at least one manufacturing perspective. This research has investigated the potential of product model based systems to support multiple viewpoints in Design for Manufacture. The research has focused on the design for manufacture of plastic injection moulded products and has explored the particular viewpoints of mouldability, mould design and mould manufacturing. The approach taken has been to explore particular information structures to support each Design for Manufacture application. An experimental Product Model has been implemented using an object-oriented database.
Simultaneous engineering; features technology; machining; product modelling; design for manufacture
