Chapter 7: Product Assembly and Design

Title: Automatic Arrangement of Product Parts, Assemblies and Modules

Author(s): Berkun Culha

Address: Institute for Applied Computer Science in Mechanical Engineering, Karlsruhe University Kaiserstraße 12 - 76131 Karlsruhe Germany

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2005 pp. 383 - 389

Abstract/Summary: The rising need for validation techniques in the early stages of design is evident. The product architecture, i.e. functional structure and arrangement of the assemblies has major influence on functional behavior, costs, development strategies and manufacturing processes of the product. The arrangement is determined by the manual variation of the positions of parts, assemblies and modules. The feasibility of a certain arrangement concept can be anticipated by checking the requirements, geometrical partitioning, spatial concerns of assembly and inspection. CAD systems and DMU-tools embedded in PLM systems offer some help. The available functions include the creation of assembly constraints, collision detection, kinematics simulation and fitting simulation. This means that the offered tools for arrangement are predominantly analysis tools for later stages of design and give no methodical support for the synthesis of arrangements. This paper will introduce an approach for the automatic synthesis and variation of arrangements.

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