Integrated product and process development using rapid prototyping and rapid tooling technologies

Abstract

The paper is on the methodology of integrated product and process development using rapid prototyping (RP) and rapid tooling (RT) technologies. The generated method integrates the virtual and physical model of a new product design. The consequence optimization model has been proposed which classifies the optimization procedure into two stages. The first stage is devoted to optimizing virtual prototypes of new products. The objective function for this task has been proposed. In the second stage the specialized knowledge base (KB) has been applied for the optimum selection of RP & RT technologies. The created methodology has been tested by appropriate experiments.