LLM-Aided Design for Manufacturing: A Multi-Agent System for Intent-Preserving Redesign of CAD for Improved Manufacturability
We introduce autonomous, intent-preserving Design for Manufacturing (DFM) redesign of CAD parts: given an engineer's CAD model, the method returns a variant that is easier to manufacture without losing its design intent. Generating such a redesign in a single shot is unreliable, since CAD fidelity degrades as parts grow complex; we instead produce it as a sequence of individually verified design transitions. Our DFM-Redesign pipeline realizes this with two coupled agent subsystems driven by a pretrained multimodal LLM: a DFM Reviewer that inspects the current design and proposes one intent-preserving manufacturability improvement at a time, and a CAD Modifier that executes each proposal as an edit to the part's CadQuery program. The CAD Modifier closes a verification loop, compiling every candidate edit and visually checking it against the intended change from multi-view renderings, then re-generating or re-instructing until the edit is accepted or abandoned. Iterating review and verified modification compounds edits into parts more complex than one-shot generators reliably produce, preserves the original intent at each step, and requires no fine-tuning. On a 46-part benchmark scored by chamfer distance to reference geometries, the CAD Modifier reproduces target parts more accurately on average than chain-of-thought single agents given the same tools, and ablations isolate the contributions of the visual review loop and of captioning the design state before each edit. A centrifugal pump casing built from 32 chained transitions illustrates the complexity reachable by compounding verified edits. This is a preliminary report: evaluation of the full review-and-redesign loop, including manufacturability gain and an operational measure of intent preservation, is ongoing.