For years, advanced sheet metal fabrication – like that provided by TSM Houston (Texas Sheet Metal) – has focused on the automation of punching, shearing, nesting and bending processes. Recently, innovative systems have been created that integrate these processes, and planners that generate near-minimum manufacturing costs – by combining several sub-systems that work cooperatively.

Advanced sheet metal fabrication can be optimized when sufficient information can be collected to produce a production plan for any sheet metal part. To begin, the design should always be unambiguous. It should represent one, and exactly one part. Secondly, the design must be complete (include tolerances, etc.). Finally, collect additional information that helps identify aspects of the design. It can make an extremely difficult planning task relatively easy.

Advanced sheet metal fabrication involves two approaches that have been developed to identify these features in a design: feature recognition and design-with-features. Feature recognition searches the geometric description of a part for known patterns and then label the geometric subset with a feature name. Design-with-features allows the designer to label the geometry directly. The advantages of these approaches in advanced sheet metal fabrication include a reduction of the product development cycle by increasing awareness of the manufacturing process during the design process.

While the use of planning features in advanced sheet metal fabrication does look inviting, because they provide useful encoding of known information, they can also cause new problems. For example, features can interact in negative ways. One feature may suggest process “x” while another may suggest process “y”. These conflicting processes can potentially be resolved using feature algebras and production rules to handle negative interactions.

This planning system has been applied successfully to many complicated parts, with the general ability to plan and manufacture parts in under one hour after the flat patterns are prepared. Advanced sheet metal fabrication is an ever-expanding field of study, because efficiency means profit, and encouraging innovation pushes us all towards a better future.