Tooling layout on a press brake for sheet metal air bending

Air bending is a forming process by which very complicated three-dimensional parts are produced on a press brake. A bending operation is performed on a station consisting of a punch and a die. A part is produced by performing a sequence of bending operations, often requiring different stations. The stations that are necessary to produce the part are mounted on a press brake. This paper discusses several approaches for the optimal placement of the stations on a press brake. Process constraints and objectives regarding efficiency are taken into account. Both exhaustive enumeration and neighbourhood search are used for solving the formulated problems. The reported computational experiments show that all problems can be solved satisfactorily, and that, in a dynamic industrial environment, neighbourhood search is more appropriate because of the limited available computation time.