Because of intensification of the international market situation the industry is forced to extend the product range and to shorten the period of time between the model changes in order to put new products on the market. Standards that allow generating product and resource variants by creating reusable structures (templates) have to be worked out to support the simultaneous engineering process. The challenge is the parallelisation of the product development and the production planning as far as possible to generate a robust production. In process planning as a part of assembly planning, the assembly processes and their sequence have to be defined and the motion path and speed of an assembly process can be visualized and optimized by Digital Mock-up (DMU). Realising an early connection between product design and assembly planning new strategies have to be deveIoped.

Kurzfassung Auf Grund der Globalisierung und dem daraus resultierenden, verschärften Wettbewerb sind die Unternehmen gezwungen ihre Produktion zu optimieren und ihre Konstruktions- und Planungsprozesse zu beschleunigen. Die Feature-Technologie bietet neue Möglichkeiten, um die Produktenstehungszeiten zu reduzieren, die Produkt- und Planungsqualität zu verbessern und auch Kosten einzusparen. Die Vorteile der Feature-Technologie werden in diesem Artikel vorgestellt und ein viel versprechender Ansatz wird aufgezeigt.

No abstract

As the quality of manufactured products as well as the quality of the used manufacturing processes has become more and more important for a company in order to stay competitive in the last decades, an integrated quality management leading towards intelligent manufacturing represents a key factor today. Therefore, new methods are required for considering quality information in all phases of the product life cycle. Feature technology and especially the use of so-called measurement and quality features represent an approach towards integrated quality management and the achievement of process-oriented and global quality control loops. Furthermore, feature technology in general also represents a high potential just within the area of sheet metal forming where it can be used to provide additional information for designing manufacturing processes and constructing tools and devices in manufacturing systems.

The globalization and its consequences have driven the competition to a new