A new computer aided design environment using intelligence that is distributed throughout advanced production machines

With complex designs involving many manufacturing processes, a designer may have a broad understanding of the overall process, but a limited detailed knowledge of the individual processes. New techniques to analyse design situations and to implement the results within a new user interface are presented. The new design environment focused and guided a designer in the task of designing tooling for plastic part manufacture. The work demonstrated that in the future a designer’s knowledge might be collected and analysed for use in an automated system. This may allow part or all of the design process to be automated. To demonstrate this new design environment, a small production area was created that included new types of task machine and virtual task-machines. The new task machinery was successfully integrated into the production environment and automatically scheduled, configured, and programmed.