Maintaining consistency between CAD elements in collaborative design using association management and propagation (original) (raw)

Management of Associations within Digital Mock-Ups for Improved Collaboration

In the current collaborative and extended-enterprise environment, product definition must be exchanged between original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and other partners who contribute to the evolution of product definition. In many cases, an information package, which is associated with other objects in the DMU, must thus be extracted from the OEM's Digital Mock -up (DMU) and be sent to partners and suppliers to allow them to perform the required work on their work packages (WP). The objective of our research is to maintain the associations between objects when a work package is removed from the DMU of the originator, modified by the subcontractor, and then reinserted into the DMU. We propose an association management model to transpose the initial work package associations towards the modified work package, to reconcile these associations with the DMU and then propagate changes towards the latter to maintain consistency.

Improving Design Productivity and Product Data Consistency

Feature Based Product Life-Cycle Modelling, 2003

Computer Aided Design systems still suffer from a number of shortcomings with regards to the full design process: they provide limited solutions for maintaining product data consistency and offer no assistance to relieve designers from tedious, repetitive, solid modeling work. This paper presents a framework for improved support of the design process from preliminary to detailed design phase. The proposed solution aims at managing product data consistency within the assembly model as well as at assisting designers with specific geometric definition tasks by exploiting the design context. First, relationships between parts are captured by establishing specialized technological links, called derivation links, that encapsulate specific design knowledge. These links are then used to apply design knowledge to the design context and to derive design feature geometry, called pseudo-imprints. These links are maintained and later exploited to control design change propagation. An aircraft structure design example illustrates these concepts.

Collaboration and Application Integration: Distributed Design with Virtual CAD

Global Engineering, Manufacturing and Enterprise Networks, 2001

The pervasiveness of computer networking and rapid progress in computer performance have made global cooperation of designers a real possibility. While these technologies provide the hardware infrastructure, software development is struggling to keep pace with these developments. There are many legacy applications and competing new developments, but unfortunately most of those operate on specific platforms in isolated environments. Cooperation of designers working on those systems is very difficult; a significant problem being that different data converter facilities are needed to exchange, interpret and combine designs components produced on different systems. The system presented in this paper aims at integrating different CAD systems and achieve true interoperability, where components designed in one system can be easily viewed, modified or integrated into other designs. The approach taken was creating an integration platform, and different CAD systems are integrated into a virtual CAD system in a seamless manner. The original CAD systems store objects designed locally on that system, while remote access is provided via an integration layer.

A Theoretical Framework for Concurrent Integration of Cad with Downstream Applications

The paper presents a theoretical model for the integration of CAD with downstream activities of a product, in concurrent engineering environment, using STEP standard. A feature-based approach is used in the model since features are considered as the main factor in integration of CAD with downstream applications. Feature conversion is used to transform features from one application model to another. STEP standard is used for data exchange and information sharing between the multiple applications of a product development. To achieve the design of a product to be easy for manufacturing and assembly, and at the same time be cost-effective, Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA), the most common and popular DFX tools are mentioned. Using the model, the designer may design products using concurrent engineering philosophy, so that possible design errors can be foreseen and thus corrected in the early design stage. As a result, the total cost and time for developing a product will be significantly reduced. Future work will include the implementation of the framework to a real life problem. This paper presents a new theoretical model for the integration of CAD with downstream applications of a product, in concurrent engineering environment, using STEP as a standard.

CoDE: A Cooperative Design Environment-- A New Generation of CAD Systems

Concurrent Engineering, 2000

According to conceptual changes on design methodology, this paper presents some research results on a new generation of CAD systems. This new software has not to be used to achieve automatic design tasks at all. On the contrary, it has to make part of an integrated design environment. A cooperative design modeller is then presented as a support for cooperative and integrated design methodology in this design environment. It mainly allows every design actors to share a unique database owing to a formal exchange network. The modeller provides a graphic interface to add, edit or modify data. Moreover the modeller manages the shared database in order to realise heavy design tasks as data propagation or data coherence management. The presented modeller takes place in the global design environment connected to specific applications based on specific design tasks (process planning, structure analysis). An informal communication network worthwhile in any design group including human actors also assists the cooperative design modeller.

Standardized data exchange of CAD models with design intent

Computer-Aided Design, 2008

Modern CAD systems generate feature-based product shape models with parameterization and constraints. Until recently, standards for CAD data exchange among different CAD systems were restricted to the exchange of pure shape information. These standards ignored the construction history, parameters, constraints, features and other elements of 'design intent' present in the model to be transferred. This paper suggests an implementational foundation for CAD data exchange with preservation of design intent, based on the use of newly published parts of the International Standard ISO 10303 (STEP). Case studies are presented which employ a hypothetical STEP application protocol (AP) using Parts 55, 108 and 111 of ISO 10303. A prototype translator based on this AP has been implemented and tested. The paper reports on the experience gained in 'intelligent' data exchange.

Multiagent Based Product Data Communication System for Computer Supported Collaborative Design

2013

Today, designers and engineers on collaborative design environments often work in parallel and independently using different tools distributed at separate locations. Due to unique characteristic of engineering design, interaction during product development is difficult to maintain. As the information and communication technologies advance, computer supported collaborative design (CSCD) becomes more promising. Nevertheless, a potential problem remains between the product design and manufacturing, which primarily lies on the geometric shape of products that exists inherent in masscustomization. Meanwhile, each CAD/CAM technology has ist own authoring tools, which govern the use of independent language and format for expressing various features and geometry. This condition creates incompatibility and has significant impact to the product costs. This chapter is to address the incompatibility problem by introducing the architecture of a multiagent-based product data communication system. The developed system is adaptive and has a capability for autonomous tracking of design changes. The tracking model is able to support forward and backward tracking of constraint violation during the collaborative design transactions.