University of Maryland, College Park, MDDesign 1Step 3: Selecting a Material and a Process Sequence Combination. At this step, the designer can analyze various non-dominated sequences and a detailed comparison on the cost can be performed. Dominance among different sequences can be determined at evenThis section describes the algorithm used to generate a set of combinations of material and primary processes Cmp that can satisfy business requirements, material requirements, and high-level form requirements. Various steps in our algorithm are describeThis section describes the algorithm used to generate a set of alternative process sequences for each shape modification feature and gross shape’s unfinished accuracy requirements.For each combination of material and primary process, designers need to define one gross shape and zero or more shape modification features to provide detailed form requirements. Before we construct alternative process sequences, we need to make sure thaWhen process parameters are dependent we need another method to determine the parameters values to estimate the maximum and the minimum cost. Let C be the processing and material cost for a given process. Let us assume that x1 and x2 are two process paraOtherwise, return7 SELECTING MATERIAL AND A PROCESS SEQUENCELet us consider design of a housing. A rough sketch of its form is shown in Figure 7. Various design requirements are given as follows:Business Requirements:ProcessAutomaticList of Figures.pdfList of FiguresFeng Bio.pdfBiography of Dr. Shaw FengSriram Bio.pdfBiography of Dr. Ram D. Sriram1 A System for Generating Process and Material Selection Advice During Embodiment Design of Mechanical Components Satyandra K. Gupta and Yusheng Chen Mechanical Engineering Department and Institute for Systems Research University of Maryland, College Park, MD Shaw Feng and Ram Sriram National Institute of Standards and Technology Gaithersburg, MD ABSTRACT This paper describes a systematic approach to material and process selection during the embodiment design of mechanical components and a system for generating process and material selection advice. Quite often during the embodiment design stage, design requirements are not precisely defined. Therefore, the system described in this paper accounts for imprecision in design requirements during generation and evaluation of alternative process sequences and material options. To reduce the computational effort, the system uses a depth-first branch-and-bound search algorithm. This aids in exploring promising process sequences and material options that can be used to meet the given set of design requirements. Various process sequences and material options are evaluated by using a commercial cost estimation tool. 1 INTRODUCTION Design of a product requires the satisfaction of a set of functional requirements. In addition, there are sets of manufacturing process-dependent constraints that must also be satisfied in order to produce the individual components comprising the product. Designers, therefore, must satisfy both types of constraints. In most designs, process constraints play a significant role in determining the detailed features of the final form of the components. Moreover, there is usually more than one manufacturing process that can be used to manufacture these components. Therefore, the satisfaction of a given set of functional constraints can be realized by components that can appear in many different forms, depending on the process constraints. Usually cost considerations play a major role in the final selection of the process and material combination. Traditionally, designers select process and materials using either their own previous experience, or the experience of the manufacturing engineer. Most designers are familiar with very limited number of manufacturing processes. Therefore, if designers rely on their own knowledge, they might not consider unfamiliar manufacturing processes that may turn out to be an attractive alternative to the processes known to designers. This is increasingly becoming a problem in today’s era of rapid changes in manufacturing technologies. This makes it difficult for a designer to be familiar with all the manufacturing processes. Many designers approach manufacturing process providers and ask them for advice on the process and material combination. If the design task is not very complex, manufacturing engineers can use their knowledge of the manufacturing processes and materials to suggest a possible combination that would produce the design. As this step is done manually, it is very likely that manufacturing engineers may not be considering all Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 22(1):28--45, 20032 the available processes and materials. Moreover, they may not even be aware of the existence of certain processes and materials. Hence, even if their advice help the designer, it may not be the best advice. There exist a large number of manufacturing processes and materials that are being used widely all over the world. Each of these processes and materials has its own capabilities and characteristics. As these combinations are numerous, the designer may have to spend enormous amount of time trying to find out the right process and material combination. Hence, in a realistic scenario, it is not possible for the designer to be able to get the best process and material combination by evaluating all possible combinations manually. It would be helpful to have a process and material selection software where all the available processes are registered. The designer can use this software to get advice on the possible processes and materials. Design activity can be divided into three main stages: conceptual design, embodiment design, and detailed deign [Pahl and Beitz 1996]. Usually sufficient information exists at embodiment design level for starting process and material selection. The following aspects need to be addressed during material and process selection. • Coupling between material, component size, and processes: Whether or not a process can be selected depends on both the material type and the component size. In many cases, component size cannot be defined without knowing the material type and the process cannot be selected without knowing the size. Therefore, it is difficult to treat this problem as a single database look-up problem. • Cost Interactions among processes: Often a component may require