De ® ning specialized design similarity measures JEFFREY

Similar product designs resemble each other and have similar attributes and characteristics. When examining a product design to create its process plan, design its ® xture, 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 ® le cabinet, or from a database (in a product data management system). Then, they retrieve the process plan (or ® xture 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 speci® c settings. This paper presents an approach for developing function-speci® c design similarity measures. Such a measure explicitly exploits the speci® c need for similar products and thus improves variant approaches for process planning, ® xture planning, and manufacturability evaluation. The approach is applied to a speci® c ® xture planning domain.