Study And Application On Case-Based Rapid Integrated Design System Of Mechanical Product

The product development is one of the vital activities of an enterprise. Due to increasing competition and customers' requirements in manufacturing industry, the search for shorter product development cycles and lower cost becomes essential, which puts forward higher requirements to enterprises during product development. Therefore, how to develop products with lower cost and higher quality within a short lead-time turn into a key to enhance enterprises' competition and shake off their predicaments, and is also a "bottleneck" that baffles most enterprises. In accordance with advanced manufacturing technologies, this paper addresses the rapid design technologies and strategies in collaboration with Wuhan Iron & Steel (Group) Corporation, aiming to facilitate development of strip coiler, which is an important equipment hi strip steel production.The architecture of integration design system and its key technologies are presented. The critical issue of performing the rapid response is attributed to effective utility and reuse of the existing information resources of products. This establishs a foundation for building integrated design system that is oriented on rapid response.Product models which are formerly presented are usually emphasized on only one aspect, either reuse of product structure, or product dynamic model. Neither of them can express product design process sufficiently. Taking these factors into accounts, a hybrid model is presented which can meet the requirements of rapid product development.Conventional product development process is analyzed, and product process re-engineering for concurrent engineering is studied. Then, IDEF3 and object-oriented Petri net(OPN) model for product development process is constructed respectively. The whole process is realized on SmarTeam platform.Coiler intelligent design system is developed based on PDM platform. Thesystem introduces the technology of case-based reasoning, namely, by calculating the similarity between the historical cases in database and the current design requirements, the best analogical case can be retrieved. Then, by adapting it according to rules or knowledge, a new design case is available. The system integrates the successful cases, design knowledge and experiences accumulated by enterprises and improves the practicability and intelligence of the coiler design system.Cost driving product characteristics are studied and a generic framework for cost estimation in product design phase is presented. Coiler cost estimate is performed through self-learning method. The method can estimate the product's cost without full knowledge of the manufacturing process plans in product conceptual design phase.CAx integration technology with PDM platform is studied. A prototype of CAx integration with PDM platform is constructed through COM/DCOM technology using VC++ 6.0. Three levels of integrations, envelopment, interface and seamless integrations are realized. The digital platform for design, engineering analysis and simulation of coiler is constructed successfully. The engineering applications have proved that the system can shorten lead-time, lower costs and decrease loss effectively. The research results can be applied to developments of other products.