Fast bending sequence planning for progressive press-working

Manufacturing process planning of the product, especially planning of the bending sequence is the most critical task in designing the press-working line. Three acceleration methods of the bending sequence planning are proposed. First, bending operations in the progressive press-working must comply some topological constraints of a port. These constraints are used as filters for excluding infeasible bending sequences. Next, the same geometric computations for checking the bending feasibility are repeated many times in the bending sequence planning. Such redundancies are eliminated by saving and re-using the previous computation results. Finally, in order to realize the stable part positioning, two parallel and symmetrical lines of a part are often bent simultaneously. Consideration of such simultaneous bending in the planning process can reduce the search space of the solution. Based on the methods, an experimental bending sequence planning program is implemented and demonstrated.