Increasing global competition is challenging the manufacturing industry to bring competitively priced, well-designed and well-manufactured products to market in a timely fashion. Although product design incurs only a small fraction of the total product cost, the decisions made during the design phase determine a significant portion of the product cost [1], and can be crucial to the success or failure of the product [2,3]. Since the cost of making essential design changes escalates steeply with time, the ability to make crucial changes during the design phase translates into significant savings over making changes during production run [3]. To achieve this goal, increasing research attention is being directed toward integrating engineering design and manufacturing. These attempts have led to the evolution of design for manufacturability (DFM) methodologies [4]. These involve simultaneously considering design goals and manufacturing constraints in order to identify and alleviate manufacturing problems while the product is being designed; thereby reducing the lead time and improving the product quality.
Traditionally, the translation of the design concept into a final product to be manufactured has been accomplished by time-consuming iterations between design and manufacturing engineers. Often, a designer would complete the entire design before passing the blueprints on to a manufacturing department. If the manufacturing engineers noticed any manufacturing related problems, they would notify designers and design would be sent through another iteration. To expedite these iterations, automated manufacturability analysis systems are being developed---allowing designers to analyze manufacturability during the design stage. Such systems vary significantly by approach, scope, and level of sophistication. On one side of spectrum are software tools for providing estimates of the approximate manufacturing cost. On another extreme are sophisticated tools that perform detailed design analyses and offer redesign suggestions. How to automatically analyze manufacturability during early design states is a challenging research problem with an active and growing research community. While a large number of technical papers have been published, each covering important facets of this problem, there is no paper in open literature that provides an overview of broad advances that have been made in this area.
In this paper, we provide a survey of current state of the art in automated manufacturability analysis. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents some of the historical context that have facilitated current interest in manufacturability analysis. Section 3 outlines characteristics that can be used to compare and classify various systems. Section 4 gives an overview of representative work in manufacturability analysis for mechanical assembly, near-net shape manufacturing, machining, and electro-mechanical domains. Section 5 discusses some of the related software tools that are needed to accomplish effective manufacturability analysis. Lastly, in Section 6, we attempt to expose some of the existing research challenges and future directions.
We expect that this paper will be of interest to a diverse group of readers: to experts, it will provide an overview of existing technology and help them compare their work to other efforts. To newcomers to this area, it will serve as tutorial and provide references to many detailed work. To industry and end-users, it will provide insight into a new and exciting family of software tools and hopefully expedite the transfer of these new technologies from academic prototypes to commercial software tools.