Developing an integrated framework for feature-based early manufacturing cost estimation

The major objective of concurrent engineering is to consider the related downstream manufacturing during the design stage. Estimating manufacturing cost during the early design stage is one area that has been given little attention by researchers. However, if the product manufacturing cost can be estimated during the design stage, designers can modify a design to achieve proper performance as well as a reasonable cost at an early stage of the product development process.Basically, manufacturing cost is determined by shape complexity, product precision and tooling process. That is, if these data can be obtained and considered during the design stage, estimating manufacturing cost during the early product development stage will become a feasible task.In this research, a framework for estimating the manufacturing cost in terms of a feature-based approach is proposed. This system tends to estimate the manufacturing cost of a design according to the shapes and precision of its features. The objective of this research is to provide a tool to assist a designer, who has little knowledge about the manufacturing process, to estimate the fabrication cost of a design during its conceptual stage, in order to reduce unnecessary costs in the downstream process.