Search

Brake forming is widely applied in the high variety and small batch part manufacturing of sheet metal components, for the bending of straight bending lines. Currently, the planning of the bending sequences is a task that has to be performed manually, involving many heuristic criteria. However, set-up and bend sequencing procedures and knowledge have to be formally formalized and modeled, for the development of computer-aided process planning systems for sheet metal forming. This paper describes the application of fuzzy set theory for the normalization and modeling of the set-up and bend sequencing process for sheet metal bending. A fuzzy-set based methodology is used to determine the optimal bending sequences for the brake forming of sheet metal components, taking into account the relative importance of handling and accuracy.