Assembly Planning of Sheet Metal Dies for Automotive Parts

摘要

The paper describes a CAD-based approach to some management tasks related to the manufacture of stamping tools for car body parts. The proposed method generates assembly plans for stamping and punching dies from their design information. Die assembly includes a variety of part handling, measurement and surface finishing operations, which form a highly constrained process escaping some critical assumptions underlying most generative planning methodologies in literature. The proposed solution is based on a comprehensive description model of the assembly process, which represents the space of all feasible operation sequences for any allowable die configuration within a predefined domain. Once a specific configuration has been retrieved from solid and surface CAD descriptions of die parts, the assembly model is instantiated into a graph-like data structure, which include only applicable operations and their precedence constraints. An instance describes operations at a sufficient detail level to support time estimation, process documentation and production scheduling. A prototype software tool derived from the assembly planning method has been tested in a real industrial context, in order to evaluate its potential impacts on the efficiency of die manufacture.