Reengineering the Digital Manufacturing Workflow – Application to Wood Buildings Prefabrication

During the early stages of the manufacturing process, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) to Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) transition is very common. Design-to-order companies cannot afford to operate manually the design and planning computer-aided software chain for each new custom product. The core of this research is: why wasting efforts to rediscover “how” to manufacture “what” is often already known at the design stage? The proposed approach removes the dependency to the CAD-to-CAM link and to its mandatory human support. Rather than identifying the manufacturing instructions from a drawing, it relies on generating instructions directly from an input data model, and obtaining drawings by simulation of these instructions.