Critical tolerance oriented process planning in sheet metal bending

Although bending is one of the final processes in sheet metal part manufacture, it is relatively inaccurate compared to the other components of sheet metal processing. Critical tolerances at several locations on the sheet metal part impose limitations on bending operations and sequences. The lack of success up to now in embedding accuracy in process planning for sheet metal products has resulted mainly from the fact that tolerance analysis usually requires simulating the manufacturing process. This paper discusses the issue of automatic determination of the bending sequence for identifying cases where the problem of determining the bending order which results in the best accuracy at specific locations is, in fact, a topological problem. Two explicit rules for achieving the best accuracy in such cases are formulated and then demonstrated by using these rules to construct a precedence graph.