A large number of manufacturing operation planning problems can be formulated as state space search problems In case of sheet metal bending operation planning processing a search node involves extensive geometric reasoning Such computation intensive node processing limits the number of search nodes that can be expanded in a reasonable amount of time making it di cult to solve real life operatio...

With fluid forming processes getting more and more common in industrial application a lot of research is carried out to analyze the forming behavior of sheet metal within these processes. In order to gather experimental information about the forming behavior of the workpiece, an imaging system is presented, that will allow determining the actual shape within the forming process. The system has ...

A literature review of sheet metal forming errors as well as geometrical dimensions and tolerances (GD&T) shows that the theoretical means for the allocation of process tolerances with respect to GD&T are insufficient. In order to judge the influence of geometrical process errors (e.g., angular errors of bends), two typical sheet metal designs with parallelism and a position tolerance are studi...

Expert system can be defined as an intelligent computer program, a repository of knowledge, a set of rules, like a human consultant, all aiming at delivering accurate solutions/suggestions to a problem at any level, say during plan, design, manufacture, and quality control. Some of the important definitions are quoted here. “An expert system is a computer system used to distribute the expertise...

Abstract This paper analyzes the topological properties of sheet metal parts represented schematically (zero thickness, zero bend radii). Although such parts are usually non-manifold objects, the paper establishes a general topological invariant f = s + b + e + w v gnm + m regarding the number of facets, components, bends, free edges, welds, vertices holes and volumes, respectively. Correspondi...

Contemporary process planners for sheet metal bending solve the process planning problem for individual parts. Quite often, many di erent parts can be produced on shared setups. However, plans generated by current process planning systems fail to exploit this commonality between setups and try to generate optimal setups for individual parts. In this paper, we present an algorithm for multi-part...