A progressive die is an effective tool for the efficient and economical production of sheet metal components in large quantities. Nowadays, progressive die designers still spend much of their time on choosing better layouts among feasible ones. This study employs Pro/Web.Link, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and JavaScriptTM to develop an application which helps evaluate automatically strip layouts in Pro/Engineer software environment. This thesis proposes solutions for the following problems:
1. Extracting geometry information from a given 3D model of strip layout.
2. Recognition of punching, notching and bending operations based on the geometry information of strip layout.
3. Calculating total evaluating score of the strip layout based on four factors: station number factor, moment balancing factor, strip stability factor and feed height factor.
The Pro/Web.Link application can be developed as a validation/analysis tool for strip layouts or can be integrated with other existing application modules in order to form an automatic system of progressive die design: punch design, strip layout design, and mold base design.

A progressive die is an effective tool for the efficient and economical production of sheet metal components in large quantities. Nowadays, progressive die designers still spend much of their time on choosing better layouts among feasible ones. This study employs Pro/Web.Link, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and JavaScriptTM to develop an application which helps evaluate automatically strip layouts in Pro/Engineer software environment. This thesis proposes solutions for the following problems:
1. Extracting geometry information from a given 3D model of strip layout.
2. Recognition of punching, notching and bending operations based on the geometry information of strip layout.
3. Calculating total evaluating score of the strip layout based on four factors: station number factor, moment balancing factor, strip stability factor and feed height factor.
The Pro/Web.Link application can be developed as a validation/analysis tool for strip layouts or can be integrated with other existing application modules in order to form an automatic system of progressive die design: punch design, strip layout design, and mold base design.

[1] Schubert P. B., Die Methods: Design, Fabrication, Maintenance, and Application, Industrial Press Co., 1967.
[2] Gupta S. K., “Sheet metal bending operation planning: using virtual node generation to improve search efficiency”. Journal of Manufacturing Systems, Vol. 18, No. 22, 1999, pp. 127-139.
[3] Schaffer G., “Computing design of progressive die”, American Machinist, Vol. 22, 1971, pp. 73-75.
[4] Thanapandi C. M., Walairacht A., and Ohara S., “Genetic algorithm for bending process in sheet metal industry”, IEEE Electrical and Computer Conference, Toronto, Vol. 2, 2001, pp. 957-962.
[5] Kannan T. R., and Shunmugam M. S., “Processing of 3D sheet metal components in STEP AP-203 format. Part II: feature reasoning system”, International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 47, No. 5, 2009, pp. 1287-1308.
[6] Alan C. Lin, and Dean K. Sheu, “Knowledge-based sequence planning of shearing operations in progressive dies”, International Journal of Production Research, 2010. (accepted for publication)
[7] Ivana Suchy, Handbook of die design, Second Edition, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2006.
[8] Serope Kalpakjian, Manufacturing engineering and technology, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley, 1995.
[9] Christopher Lewis, A Pro/Engineers Guide to Pro/Web.Link, First Edition, Lulu Publisher, 2008.
[10] http://www.custompartnet.com/wu/sheet-metal