The mission of the Manufacturability-Driven Design Lab (MDDL) is to establish and grow an internationally recognized research and educational program in constraint-driven mechanical design for manufacturing (DFM), with particular emphasis on the interactions and couplings between design decisions and manufacturing system realities. The lab focuses on bridging the persistent gap between theoretical design optimization and what can be reliably produced, assembled, deployed, and sustained in real engineering environments. In this role, MDDL contributes a distinctive capability within the design and manufacturing research community: developing rigorous, computable representations of manufacturability and realizability that allow optimization and design results (both at the product and system level) to survive contact with real process capability and real engineering constraints.
The unifying theme of the lab is the formal translation of real manufacturing and lifecycle constraints into usable design knowledge. MDDL develops foundational theory and computational methods for representing and enforcing manufacturability and realizability constraints, while grounding these efforts in experimental evidence from physical manufacturing processes. The laboratory’s work is therefore both conceptual and translational, producing models and frameworks that are theoretically rigorous but also validated against real process/material capability and system behavior. This approach enables the lab to produce generalizable constraint models, experimentally defensible design rules, and decision-support methods that can be embedded directly into design automation, topology optimization, and generative design workflows.
Our research advances manufacturability-driven product design, emphasizing formal representation, discovery, and enforcement of manufacturing constraints throughout the design process. Core efforts include design automation with manufacturability validation, mismatch mitigation between design intent and process capability, minimally restrictive design-for-manufacturing (MR-DFM), and integration of manufacturability constraints within topology optimization and generative design workflows. Experimental validation (including characterization of material-process interactions) is used to quantify how design rules emerge from physical process behavior rather than idealized assumptions. A central outcome of this thrust is to shift manufacturability from an informal set of heuristics into a reproducible and model-based design discipline.
A complementary thrust addresses realizability-aware systems engineering, extending DFM principles from components to complex multi-scale systems. This work includes lifecycle-based system design, constraint-aware design of experiments, spiral development methods, and modeling of energy-restricted and expeditionary manufacturing environments relevant to defense, infrastructure, and autonomous systems. Emphasis is placed on understanding how material, process, logistics, and human constraints propagate across system architectures. This systems-level perspective provides a consistent framework for evaluating not only whether a design can be produced, but whether it can be deployed, sustained, and adapted under operational resource constraints.
The laboratory maintains deep expertise in additive and formative manufacturing processes, including fused filament fabrication, powder material extrusion, laser powder bed fusion, wire-arc additive manufacturing, friction-based additive processes, and injection molding. Research spans hybrid additive–formative workflows, process–structure–property relationships, and the development of material datasets to support data-driven DFM frameworks. These process and material foundations provide the empirical basis needed to quantify manufacturability limits, validate constraint models, and ensure that design automation outputs remain physically defensible.
These three main thrusts and supporting projects form an integrated research program centered on realizability in engineering design. By combining formal constraint modeling, computational design automation, and experimentally grounded process understanding, MDDL enables engineering products and systems that are not only optimized, but reliably manufacturable and sustainable under real-world conditions. In doing so, the laboratory addresses a critical gap in modern engineering design research by establishing a unified constraint-driven framework that connects design theory, manufacturing physics, and lifecycle system realization.
