Utilization of State Drivers to Support Design for Manufacturing

Together with the fast paced technological advances, the complexity and dynamic in manufacturing is steadily increasing. At the same time, the (functional) requirements derived from the customers are becoming more challenging to fulfill. In order to cope with this challenge, designers have to focus more on design for manufacturing besides taking the requirements derived from the customers into account. This is not only important from an economic perspective, e.g., to reduce avoidable expenses during manufacturing but often also directly related to the fulfillment of customer requirements from a quality perspective, e.g., structural behavior of highly stressed products.In manufacturing, the product state concept describes the subsequent development of a product along the process chain by its accumulated state. It can be used to increase the understanding of the manufacturing processes from a system's point of view and can be applied e.g., to support quality management. Within the concept it is possible to identify so-called ‘state drivers’, by means of Support Vector Machine based feature ranking on an accumulating product and process state vector. These state drivers take explicit and implicit intra- and inter-relations between states into account and provide an insight which parameters are most relevant for the final quality outcome and where the critical points along the process chain are.In this paper, the relation between design for manufacturing and the product state concept will be discussed with a special focus on the state drivers. The question, if and how state drivers can be utilized to support the design phase and designers will be examined in detail, whilst the overall question of the appropriate detail of manufacturing feedback to design is also examined.