AUTOMATED CAD PROTECTIVE PACKAGING DESIGN

Protective packaging forms an important integral part in the materials handling process of ensuring that goods are transferred 'safely' from the source to the point of use. This paper focuses on the 'procedural' design practices for protective packaging which are predominantly manual and involves the use of implicit design rules, and is therefore amenable to design automation efforts. PROPACK, a protective packaging CAD software program for expanded styropor material has been developed by coupling various existing commercial software packages for drafting, analysis, database management, and knowledge based problem solving and consultation. In so doing, it exploits the well-proven and stable features of these tools for the different activities and stages of design. The coupling of the various packages to form an integrated system is achieved either by the creation of task specific interfaces between packages, or by making use of existing interfaces provided in some of these packages. The relative merits of adopting this approach are also discussed.