Sequence planning of sheet metal parts manufactured using progressive dies

Abstract

AbstractProgressive dies are widely used for the mass manufacture of sheet metal parts requiring several stamping operations. Sequencing these stamping operations is vital as it influences the design of the die, especially the number of stations required to make the part. This paper presents a method for automatically generating the sequence plan for parts manufactured using progressive dies. This method establishes a scheme that maps sheet metal features into their corresponding stamping operations, including shearing, bending and forming. The mapped operations are initially placed in one of two categories and then the operations in one category are clubbed together using heuristic rules. The essential characteristics of each group are analysed to establish fuzzy relationships between any selected group and the remaining groups. The final membership value vector obtained from the fuzzy set theory is used to sequence these groups. A program developed in C++ based on this method has been tested on representative industrial sheet metal parts. The methodology is validated by comparing the generated sequences, for two case studies, with those used in industry.