Assembly Modeling on the Basis of a Mechanical Design Prototype

摘要

In a complete product design environment, designers require both geometric and functional-behavioral product information at various levels of abstraction. A new product is nearly always more or less related to known, old solutions. To meet these design requirements, a function-based assembly modeling scheme is proposed as an alternative of most existing feature-based assembly modeling schemes. The paper presents a recently developed experimental top-down assembly modeling system which supports this new scheme on the basis of the concept of a mechanical design prototype. The system applies object oriented concepts to supporting design problem-solving by abstract, function-oriented assembly models, a case library of old design solutions, and a link to feature-based product models. In the system, a major advance in comparison with other assembly modeling systems is that modeling an assembly hierarchy is based not only on structural divisions but also on functional divisions. Thus various types of design knowledge of interest to designers, in particular to designers in charge of a whole product design, can be linked with different types of geometric classes in a design process.