the author’s dissertation

eingereicht und durch die Fakultät für Maschinenwesen am 22.04.2015 angenommen. The fabrication of parts in manufacturing systems requires their fixation in a defined position for machining, assembly or inspection processes using fixture devices. Especially for low-volume production and the resulting frequent change-overs, as commonly found in modern manufacturing scenarios, the design and configuration of fixtures have a strong influence on the production time and costs. To address these tasks and increase the flexibility and degree of automation of manufacturing systems, flexible fixture devices and computer-aided or automated fixture design methods are developed. While flexible fixture devices are well established in industry nowadays, no general and commonly used methods, applications or systems for computational fixture design exist so far. This is due to the fact that the involved tasks are wide-spread, knowledge intensive and strongly intertwined with other steps of the design-to-fabrication process. Further, existing computer-aided fixture design systems are rarely integrated with the configuration or embodiment of flexible fixtures on the hardwar