A Framework to Support Component Design in Jigless Manufacturing

Traditionally, the role of the tooling designer has been to identify the optimum tooling configuration for a given product design and its assembly. This frequently leads to complex dedicated tooling with extremely high build costs and long lead times. Current efforts within the aerospace industry are focussed towards a philosophy of minimising or eliminating dedicated tooling, known as “Jigless Manufacture”. To facilitate this, it is advantageous for product designers to have support from a product modelling environment, which enables components to be designed to take full advantage of jigless principles and enabling technologies. The purpose of this paper is to outline an assembly modelling and analysis framework as part of an product modelling environment to support the jigless manufacture philosophy.