Defining specialized design similarity measures

Abstract

Similar product designs resemble each other and have similar attributes and characteristics. When examining a product design to create its process plan, design its fixture, or estimate its manufacturing cost, manufacturing engineers often identify one or more similar products that the factory has manufactured in the past. They may do this from memory, from a file cabinet, or from a database (in a product data management system). Then, they retrieve the process plan (or fixture or cost estimate) for the similar product and modify it for the new product. Manufacturing and process planning experts use a complex set of rules, guidelines, and other knowledge to determine how similar two products are. Computer-aided process planning tools, however, generally use simpler, less sophisticated procedures for determining similarity. These traditional procedures may be inappropriate for specific settings. This paper presents an approach for developing function-specific design similarity measures. Such a measure explicitly exploits the specific need for similar products and thus improves variant approaches for process planning, fixture planning, and manufacturability evaluation. The approach is applied to a specific fixture planning domain.