“…Owing to its advantages in evaluating the forming difficulties at the early design stages, performing fast estimation of the blank shape and making fast analysis of the sensitivity of some process parameters (Batoz et al, 2005), the inverse approach (IA) is widely studied in the past few decades (Batoz et al, 1998(Batoz et al, , 2005Chung and Richmond, 1992a, b;Fu et al, 2009Fu et al, , 2011Guo et al, 1990Guo et al, , 2000Guo et al, , 2003Huang et al, 2006;Lan et al, 2005;Lee and Huh, 1998;Naceur et al, 2002Naceur et al, , 2004Park et al, 1999;Parsa and Pournia, 2007;Tang et al, 2007aTang et al, , b, 2010Wang et al, 2002;Zhou et al, 2009). There are two types of inverse methods among them: one is on the principle of virtual work (Guo et al, 1990;Batoz et al, 1998) and the other on the ideal forming theory (Chung and Richmond, 1992a, b).…”