Integrated and concurrent approach for compound sheet metal cutting and punching

In sheet metal processing and manufacturing, there are a lot of small- and medium-sized job shops. These small- and medium-sized manufacturing companies have been facing keen competitive pressure in the market. This pressure has forced these companies to make every effort to shorten product development lead-time, improve production efficiency, approach high-quality standards, but at the same time cut down the costs. To meet the needs of these companies, this paper presents a compound cutting and punching production method supported by an integrated CAD/CAPP/CAM system in sheet metal manufacturing. Many existing commercial CAD/CAM systems are not suitable for this manufacturing method, especially under concurrent and global design and manufacturing environments. Some problems have to be solved before these CAD/CAM systems can be employed and integrated for this compound manufacturing method. This paper deals mainly with the solutions to solve some of these problems. The solutions include an integrated data...