Formation of Part Families for Shared Setups Generation in Sheet Metal Bending

Sheet metal bending press-brakes can be setup to produce more than one type of parts without requiring a setup change. To exploit this flexibility, we need setup planning techniques to generate press-brake setups that can be shared among many different parts. In this paper, we describe an algorithm which partitions a given set of parts into setup compatible part families which can be produced on the same setup. Our algorithm is based on a two step approach. The first step is to identify setup constraints for each individual part. The second step is to form setup-compatible part families based on the compatibility of setup constraints. We expect that by producing many different types of parts on the same setup, we can significantly reduce the required number of setups and enable cost effective small batch manufacturing.