Patent ID: 7433747

Claim:
A method for generating a manufacturing process chain for a component, comprising: (a) collecting all available data pertaining to a component to be manufactured; (b) subdividing the component to be manufactured into component elements which can be manufactured independently of one another and defining process blocks for manufacturing the component elements; (c) collecting all possible core technologies for the individual process blocks, wherein the core technologies are those manufacturing processes and machining processes through which alternative manufacturing processes and machining processes differ from one another; (d) generating all possible manufacturing process chains by combining all core technologies of one process block with the core technologies of the other process blocks; (e) reducing all possible manufacturing process chains to a subset of possible manufacturing process chains based upon geometric and/or technological boundary conditions; (f) generating particularized manufacturing process chains for this subset of manufacturing process chains, wherein all of said manufacturing process chains have identical input states and identical; (g) ascertaining data pertaining to per-unit costs for the component to be manufactured, resulting from the use of the particularized manufacturing process chains; (h) ascertaining data pertaining to the technological risk and/or to the reliability of the ascertained per-unit costs for the particularized manufacturing process chains; (i) performing capital value calculations for the particularized manufacturing process chains on the basis of the particular per-unit costs; (j) selecting the optimum manufacturing process chain for the component, at least on the basis of the capital value calculations and the data pertaining to risk and/or reliability.