Introduction to aP Design¶

Info

For more introduction materials, see our aP Design product information.

aP Design helps Design Engineers optimize designs for manufacturability, cost, and sustainability, by providing:

Manufacturing cost estimates of cost of parts and assemblies.
Design Guidance to help you reduce complex and expensive geometry.
Clear views on cost, carbon emissions, and manufacturability factors.

Use aP Design to analyze the impact of changes in a product’s design, manufacturing process, and factory selection. You can then compare design options, to choose the best results for your design.

Key Concepts¶

Each part you work with in aP Design contains a component and a scenario.

Components¶

Component information includes:

Geometric Cost Drivers (GCDs): geometric features, such as holes and bends, that aP Design extracts from your CAD models.
Production and Manufacturing Information (PMI): information that you supply as inputs to aP Design, such as manufacturing materials, manufacturing processes, production environments, and production volumes.

Scenarios¶

A scenario combines the GCDs and PMI in a single version of your design. The scenario allows you to set inputs for the component, such as the material, manufacturing process, and batch size. To examine the effect of different factors, you can create, analyze, and compare scenarios for each part and assembly in your design.

Scenarios use:

Process groups: sets of manufacturing processes used to make the part. For example, the Sheet Metal process group contains processes to cut, form, and machine a part from a thin sheet of stock material.
Digital Factories: virtual environments containing information about the manufacturing equipment and regional rates of your manufacturing shop or supplier.

Use aP Design with aP Pro¶

This diagram shows how you can use aP Design along with our aP Pro product in a collaborative, iterative design process: