Assembly Search Based Top-Down Product Design

Product design is a quite complex process which needs a lot of human activities. As designer-oriented tools, the existing computer-aided design (CAD) systems are still far from being satisfactory for alleviating the burden of designers or even substituting them. Specifically, modern product design evolves from abstract concepts to concrete forms, and often contains many different design phases, while each of them has different design tasks and design models. Therefore, how to handle the heterogeneous information and the corresponding information transition is an urgent problem. Meanwhile, the exploding of information and knowledge becomes quite apparent in modern industries along with the continuing rapid evolution of the Information Era. As a result, it is of a great significance to sufficiently use the abundant knowledge in existence during the design activities.In this paper, we conduct the following work to address the problems described above:Multi-level assembly model In order to represent the various information and mutual relationships in different design phases, we present a multi-level assembly model, which can well support the characteristics of top-down product design, i.e. from abstract to concrete.Information inheritance mechanisms Based on the multi-level assembly model, we present corresponding information inheritance mechanisms. By using the mechanisms, various kinds of inter-design phases transition and intra-design phases transition can all be executed smoothly, which guarantees the maintenance of design intents and design results during the top-down product design, avoids redundant modeling and ensures the consistence between models of different design phases.Assembly model retrieval In order to reuse the abundant product models in existence, we present a flexible assembly model retrieval method. On basis of that, designers can use rough skeleton model as query to find out very relevant product models during the top-down product design, which then rapidly accelerates the design works by reusing the embedded design knowledge.Assembly search results adaptation We also present a model adaptation method for better reusing the existing models in the world. Based on that, designers can correlate the result models obtained by the assembly retrieval method and the query skeleton model together conveniently, and intelligent modifications can then be carried out to make the retrieval results consistent with the skeleton model semantically, which finally incorporates the retrieval results into the product models seamlessly.