An approach of CAD/CAM data reuse for manufacturing cost estimation

The manufacturing industries must correctly and quickly predict the production cost of a new product to face increasingly stiff competition. The proper reuse of the company's know-how guarantees the correct estimation of the manufacturing cost while respecting the required quality. The use of the Digital Mock-Up (DMU) leads to the rapid determination of the manufacturing cost from the CAD data. Thus, this paper describes an approach to estimate manufacturing cost and to produce the machining strategy of a new model by the reuse of the manufacturing expertise, acquired during old projects. The new product closely related and similar to a previous design must be found. Thus, a comparison tool is developed, in manufacturing semantics. This tool quantifies the similarity between the query CAD model and company database. The tolerance values as well as geometrical and topological parameters are considered in the similarity calculation. Feature data modelling under a standard structure is used. Two cost computation methods are proposed. Consequently, the estimated cost and machining strategy, of the studied model, are deduced. A case study is presented to show the feasibility of the proposed approach to estimate the cost and to suggest a machining strategy during the design phase.