BenDFM: A taxonomy and synthetic CAD dataset for manufacturability assessment in sheet metal bending

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new taxonomy and a synthetic dataset, BenDFM, for assessing manufacturability in sheet metal bending, enabling systematic evaluation of deep learning models in this domain.

Contribution

It proposes a comprehensive manufacturability taxonomy and presents BenDFM, the first synthetic dataset for sheet metal bending manufacturability assessment with diverse labels.

Findings

Graph-based models outperform other architectures.

Predicting setup-dependent metrics remains challenging.

BenDFM enables systematic study of manufacturability prediction.

Abstract

Predicting the manufacturability of CAD designs early, in terms of both feasibility and required effort, is a key goal of Design for Manufacturing (DFM). Despite advances in deep learning for CAD and its widespread use in manufacturing process selection, learning-based approaches for predicting manufacturability within a specific process remain limited. Two key challenges limit progress: inconsistency across prior work in how manufacturability is defined and consequently in the associated learning targets, and a scarcity of suitable datasets. Existing labels vary significantly: they may reflect intrinsic design constraints or depend on specific manufacturing capabilities (such as available tools), and they range from discrete feasibility checks to continuous complexity measures. Furthermore, industrial datasets typically contain only manufacturable parts, offering little signal for infeasible cases, while existing synthetic datasets focus on simple geometries and subtractive processes. To address these gaps, we propose a taxonomy of manufacturability metrics along the axes of configuration dependence and measurement type, allowing clearer scoping of generalizability and learning objectives. Next, we introduce BenDFM, the first synthetic dataset for manufacturability assessment in sheet metal bending. BenDFM contains 20,000 parts, both manufacturable and unmanufacturable, generated with process-aware bending simulations, providing both folded and unfolded geometries and multiple manufacturability labels across the taxonomy, enabling systematic study of previously unexplored learning-based DFM challenges. We benchmark two state-of-the-art 3D learning architectures on BenDFM, showing that graph-based representations that capture relationships between part surfaces achieve better accuracy, and that predicting metrics that depend on specific manufacturing setups remains more challenging.