Design verification for bent sheet metal parts: A graphs approach

Design for manufacturing requires the flexible verification and optimization of design features with regard to the suitability to the planned production methods. The automatic identification and generation of a suitable process plan for large scale bent sheet metal parts would provide a tool that would allow efficient feedback in the design phase. In this paper, a number of problem-size reduction methods are proposed to bring automatic manufacturability verification a few steps closer to reality. The scale of the reformulated combinatorial problems is illustrated, indicating the suitability for solution by means of known search algorithms.