A fixed component part of the development process is the manufacturing of prototypes. They serve the evaluation of the product design and help to discover the weak areas of the component and to rectify them. Prototypes are also increasingly used to implement the assembly and functional tests and due to the enormous successes in terms of the close-to-production manufacture of prototypes this leads to at an ever earlier stage of development. Product development times and costs can thus be considerably reduced by the use of prototypes.