Reusing mechanical engineering design

Abstract

Abstmet-Designin mechanical engineering is often re-design itself is generally not indexed and no direct =cess ~ -design a n d involves retrieving similar designs from various integrated design repositories or paper drawings. To supto the portion of the geometry that satisfies the property port designers a SyStem must provide valid designs t h a t satisfy to previous satisfy requirements, validated by the index is provided. The selection of the properties and characteristics used to index design data constrain the level of expression in the retrieval phase.ally designed for a specific domain usage such as feature functions, or Characteristics, and allow t h e integration a n d transformation of t h e retrieved designs into a new design t h a t meets t h e new design specifications. Many approaches accessing dcsigns for their new design needs. Most of exhas significant consequences, Indeed, selected attributes have been developed in t h e past to support designers in In general, retrieval approaches for design data are usuisting approaches t y p i c a l b store design documents as files ments through t h e indexing the entire file and do not offer designers t h e ability t h e express more complex retrieval queries or simply queries different from t h e Ones pre-computed in t h e index. No existing approach appears t o offer a real query language to retrieve cases for engineering design in various contexts represented by the geomet r y and topology of a finished design. I n these systems, retrieval queries usually are Boolean expressions of terms consisting of valued attributes a s represented through t h e indices (or Pre-comDuted annotations). In addition. these or -materjal.driven retrieval and usually-lack efficiency to handle large data repositories. These approaches do not provide a real query language but rather limited query interfaces that rely heavily upon indexed systems such as the expert driven questionnaires in Conversational CBD [I], tabular [2], frame based [9], or function structures [21]. Retrieval queries usually are Boolean expressions of terms consisting of valued attributes as represented through the a n d provide a n additional s t r u c t u r e t o access t h e docu-. . approaches usually d o not provide a framework for design integration (when components extracted from several designs must be integrated t o meet t h e new requirements), or transformation (when a component is similar b u t needs t o b e transformed t o meet t h e new specification) as needed t oThe limitations of existing approaches include: 1, queries limited to pre-computed of the drawing, as opposed to the design data themselves; 2. retrieval of a whole file instead of the extraction of geometric components of a given design that satisfy specified properties; 3. domain specific retrieval approaches, as opposed to a s u p p o r t mechanical engineering design reuse. In this paper we present an approach t o support mechanical design d a t a reuse t h a t exploits constmint databasea. This approach provides a real query lan...

Product Data Reuse in Product Development: A Practitioner’s Perspective

“…Prior research works focused on sub-activities of the data reuse process, such as: design data explosion [2], design knowledge formalization [3], similar design data retrieval [4] and design data modeling [5]. Lund et al [2] propose the storage of design variations as metadata in order to leverage speed and versatility of the database.…”

“…Lacroix [5] proposed a different approach where the geometry and the constraints expressed in STEP are the core of the data representation, to model and query data within a mechanical engineering reuse system whereas its regular usage is for data exchange.…”