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Rapid prototyping technologies can create a physical part directly from a digital model by accumulating layers of a given material. Providing tremendous flexibility in the part geometry that they can fabricate, these technologies present an opportunity for the creation of new product attributes that cannot be made with existing technologies. For this to be possible, however, various design environments including different fabrication processes need to be considered at the time of design. This paper proposes an extended design automation paradigm for design and fabrication of a new product attribute, surface macro‐texture.

As the technology matures, design rules for additive manufacturing (AM) can help ensure manufacturability, which can be viewed as compatibility between designs and the fabrication processes that produce those designs. Though often informal, current rules frequently provide direct guidelines or constraints for designing AM-destined parts. The aim of this paper is to standardize how design rules are developed and conveyed in AM by presenting design rules as sets of modular components and associated formalisms.

The proposed methodology decomposes fundamental geometry, process and material relationships into reusable modules. Independent of context, modular representations can be more easily interpreted and efficiently implemented than current one. By providing task-specific context, components are specialized to represent process-specific parameters for different AM builds and processes. This method of specialization enables designers to reconfigure design rules, rather than create new rules from scratch, thus preserving fundamental AM principles while supporting customization and explicit representation.

Modularity and formalisms provide both structure for the generalizations and a means to tailor that structure for a specific process, machine or build. The adoption of principles and formalisms that allow us to modify, extend, reconfigure or customize generalized rules as needed – instinctively and deliberately.

This method of specialization enables designers to reconfigure design rules, rather than create new rules from scratch, thus preserving fundamental AM principles while supporting customization and explicit representation.