Intensive competition on the global market puts great pressure on manufacturing companies to develop and produce products that meet requirements from customers and investors. One key factor in meeting these requirements is the efficiency of the product development and the production preparation process. Design automation is a powerful tool to increase efficiency in these two processes.

The benefits of automating the production preparation process are shortened led-time, improved product performance, and ultimately decreased cost. Further, automation is beneficial as it increases the ability to adapt products to new product specifications with production preparations done in few or in a single step. During the automation process, knowledge about the production preparation process is collected and stored in central systems, thus allowing full control over the design of production equipments.

Three main topics are addressed in this thesis: the flexibility of design automation systems, knowledge bases containing conflicting rules, and the automation of the finite element analysis process. These three topics are discussed in connection with the production preparation process of rotary draw bending.

One conclusion drawn from the research is that it is possible to apply the concept of design automation to the production preparation process at different levels of automation depending on characteristics of the implemented knowledge. In order to make design automation systems as flexible as possible, the concept of object orientation should be adapted when building the knowledge base and when building the products geometrical representations. It is possible to automate the process of setting up, running, and interpreting finite element analyses to a great extent and making the automated finite element analysis process a part of the global design automation system.

Intensive competition on the global market puts great pressure on manufacturing companies to develop and produce products that meet requirements from customers and investors. One key factor in meeting these requirements is the efficiency of the product development and the production preparation processes. Design automation is a powerful tool to increase efficiency in these two processes.

The benefits of automating the manufacturability analysis process, a part of the production preparation process, are shortened lead-time, improved product performance, quality assurance, and, ultimately, decreased costs. Further, automation is beneficial as it increases the ability to adapt products to new product specifications with production preparations done in a few or in a single step. During the automation process, knowledge about the manufacturability analysis process is collected and stored in central systems, thus allowing full control over the design of production equipments.

Topics addressed in this thesis include the flexibility of design automation systems, knowledge-bases containing alternative design rules, the automation of the finite element analysis process, manufacturability analysis over several productions steps, and the determination of production limits by looping the automated manufacturability analysis process. These topics are discussed in connection with the rotary draw bending of aluminum profiles.

It is concluded that the concept of design automation can be applied to the manufacturability analysis process at different levels of automation depending on the characteristics of the implemented knowledge. The concept of object orientation should be adapted when implementing a knowledge-base and when developing the geometrical representations of the products. This makes a design automation system flexible enough to edit underlying knowledge and to extend the targeted design space. It is possible to automate the process of setting up, running, and interpreting finite element analyses to a great extent, enabling the design automation system to evaluate its own design proposals. It is also possible to enable such systems to consider sequences of manufacturing steps and loop them to develop decision support guiding engineers early in the design process, saving time and money while still assuring high product quality.