An integrated System for Automatic Computer Aided Fixture Design

The essential factor for the recent manufacturing companies is to develop a variety of products within short timeframes. Therefore, the flexible manufacturing techniques are rapidly growing to compete the markets globally. A number of factors contribute in organizational ability to achieve flexibility and one of which is the use of fixtures to increase the pace of production. A fixture is like a mechanism because it eliminates individual marking, positioning and frequent checking before starting of actual operation and to locate and hold the work-piece during the manufacturing operation. It’s the need of time to device the systematic methodologies that integrate design within an automated environment rather than designing the actual fixture itself. In this paper, a framework comprised of fixture plan, fixture layout and fixture assembly is proposed for the automatic design of fixtures module. The module will use the knowledge representation and inference techniques from artificial intelligence and geometric modeling technique for modular fixture design. The proposed framework has several advantages over the methods proposed in the literature because at every phase of design, there will be several available solutions that satisfy the fixture requirements. A case study is also presented in the paper to validate the proposed framework.