Sheet metal forming tools play an important role in the manufacturing of many products. With shorter product life cycles and demand for shorter time to market for new products, the process for design and manufacturing of stamping tools becomes a critical part. Stamping dies are often designed and manufactured by smaller, specialized companies. For a tooling company, knowledge and experience is an important competitive advantage. Traditionally the design process has been characterized by being based on few key individuals with much experience and craftsmanship. To stay competitive in this market there is a need for more efficient processes, systems, tools and supports in order to become more industrialized. This paper presents results from a study of the state of practice in industry within progressive stamping tool design as well as a review of relevant literature. The design and manufacturing processes for stamping dies in six companies have been investigated through semi-structured interviews, from which the main challenges in the current state for the companies are identified. The results from the interviews was analyzed and compared to the established concepts and frameworks of methods found in the literature review. The results and analysis points in the direction of efforts needed in supporting the formalization and reuse of information and knowledge from previous tool projects and production, especially during the critical steps of tool process planning and creating the tool layout.

Progressive stamping tools are widely used in mass-production of sheet metal components and their performance is critical as the design of the tool impact the cost of the manufactured component significantly. Knowledge reuse is an important part of successful design in general, and in progressive stamping tool design in particular. In the study described in this paper, 8 tool designers from 5 different Swedish companies were interviewed about (1) at what points in the tool design process they search for previously designed tools for information and knowledge reuse, (2) under what conditions and for what reasons does this reuse take place, and (3) what types of information and knowledge are sought for at each point. The results show that reuse of information and knowledge from previously designed tools happens in many parts of the tool design process. The reasons and conditions for reuse vary depending on where in the process the designer is. High component complexity is one example of a common factor triggering reuse. Also, information about the performance of the tool is important to tool designers, as they only want to reuse information and knowledge from tools with good performance and low maintenance.

Design of sheet metal forming tooling is currently based on that experienced tooling designers with good knowledge of how stamping tools previously have been designed and operated in production, apply their knowledge when making a new design. For retrieving former designs, they often need to rely on their good memory. In this paper, an automatic method for retrieving relevant former cases is presented. A major challenge is defining the similarity between the current and the former cases i.e., finding the relevant parameters to include in the CBR (Case-based reasoning) search. This is here addressed by using CAD model parameters both from former components and the tooling for their production. By interviewing tooling designers in industry, a set of relevant parameters has been identified. To arrive at the correct weight of each parameter, a genetic algorithm has been used to optimize the search results. This resulted in a quick and automated way of retrieving the most relevant former cases and presenting them to the designer. The method has been tested on actual cases with promising results. This has the potential of making sheet metal part and tooling design less reliant on memory and experience.