Design and manufacture are often treated as independent activities, resulting in designs that are difficult or expensive to manufacture. The goal of designing for manufacturability is to ensure that the final design is satisfactory not only in performance, but also in producibility. To account for manufacturing considerations in the design stage, techniques are being developed that are semi-automatic that still demand considerable user interaction. Consequently, implementation requires an effective graphical interface to permit the user to communicate with the program. Therefore, the implementation is best done on a CAD/CAM workstation with advanced graphics capabilities. This grant provides a CAD/CAM workstation to be used for research in the field of design for manufacturability.
