Substantial efforts have been made to integrate manufacturing- and design-relevant knowledge into product development processes. A common approach is to provide the relevant knowledge to the design engineers using a knowledge-based system (KBS) that, in turn, becomes the engineering assistance system. Keeping the knowledge up to date is a critical issue, making knowledge acquisition a bottleneck of developing and maintaining KBS. This article presents a robust metamodel optimization and performance estimation architecture for developing and maintaining a KBS useful for design-for-manufacturing from the context of sheet-bulk metal forming. It is shown that the presented KBS or engineering assistance system helps achieve performing design-for-manufacturing, integrating both design and manufacturing knowledge. Using the presented approach helps overcome the bottleneck of knowledge acquisition and knowledge update through its self-learning component based on data mining and knowledge discovery.

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