Abstract
For the last couple of decades many studies have been carried out to find out solutions to improve the effectiveness and productivity of the plate forming process. The practical way for the automation of the plate forming process has not been, however, developed yet. Since the characteristics of heating machines may be different form each other, it is necessary to investigate the thermal deformation characteristics of the heating machine to be used in the automation system. And their characteristics may be updated as new information about thermal deformation by heating is accumulated. In this paper, data base system has been constructed based on the results of experiments and numerical analyses, which will be used in deriving the deformation estimation formula. The computer code which can automatically derive the deformation estimation formula has been also developed. This paper also illustrates how the formula is updated as experimental data are added. From the present findings, it can be said that the automatic deriving procedure may be important in the automated plate forming system since the heating line information to be generated must be directly influenced by the deformation estimation formula.