Introduction: Shorter lead-times are a constant driver for improving efficiency in the design and manufacturing of stamping tools for sheet metal components. Finding and reusing past solutions in design is an important way for improving efficiency and quality in stamping tool development. This can be done in the form of retrieving CAD-models of relevant past tooling designs. This type of knowledge reuse is standard practice among tool designers through remembering past problems, and solutions from previous projects, or having a collection of good examples of tools of different varieties, to reuse solutions from. Automatically indexing and retrieving relevant CAD-models of the tools can enable the tool designers to conduct the search more systematically and automatically. Retrieving relevant similar CAD-models automatically, however, has some challenges regarding how similarity should be defined, as geometric similarity is ill-defined [4]. A relevant metric of similarity depends on the application context, the objective, and what knowledge that the designer is searching for [3].

In this work, focus is on variations in the different use cases and situations of the stamping tool design process. The existing work done in the application to stamping tools has provided retrieval mechanisms for blanking dies [1], deep drawn features [6], and overall similarity [5]. In the stamping tool design process, the information and knowledge sought for at different stages are different in nature [2] and require individual similarity metrics and parameters to be effective. An example of this is that, the relevant CAD-models to retrieve when designing the functionality for part ejection from the tool is different from the relevant models when designing forming dies of the same tool.