Generation of Structural-and-Automation Compliant Cost-Effective Product Designs: Application to Large-Scale Sheet Metal Manufacturing

Abstract

Sheet metal manufacturing holds importance due to its vast applications in construction, automotive, and aerospace. Growth in the sheet metal manufacturing industry has pushed companies to automate manufacturing processes to increase competitiveness by reducing costs while maintaining quality. However, implementation of a new system comes with challenges across an organization, as different teams are subject to biases that result in push-back towards adoption. This thesis focuses on the generation of cost-effective product designs that are compliant with requirements provided by design, structural, and manufacturing teams through the development of a cost model to compare manufacturing value streams and a design generation tool that generates cost-effective designs given structural and automation constraints. The work resulted in cost reductions between 10% to 22%, with improvements in quality and safety metrics, when compared to legacy designs using a manual press brake (MPB). Across the series of designs generated in this work, cost reduction occurs in a distribution of part populations between 41-59% and 77-23% split across the automated panel bender (APB) and automated tube laser (TL) respectively. The implications of these results show that significant cost reductions can be achieved through minimizing material usage, which leads to lower material costs, lower fabrication or labor costs, and unchanged assembly costs.