Development Of Automatic Part Coding System In Virtual Assembly Environment

Part coding is an important component as a proportion of the information integration in the corporation, it acts as a foundation in the course of concurrent engineering, product development, and using the designed data. The method of subornation coding is used for coding the product in the enterprise, in which the affiliation among the product and its parts and assemblies are marked, the subornation of the parts would be identified clearly. Yet, this coding rule is complicated, intricate, which would not be remembered by the designers for too much details, so the coding number would be wrong, the efficiency is very low. Although a lot of enterprises designed the product by using CAD tools, automatic coding function is nor provided in those CAD softwares.An automatic coding system developed with Pro/Engineer and VC++ is studied in this paper, by using the system, the parts that should be coded would be recognized automatically, an assembly and its child parts could be coded quickly according to their subornation relations in the product.Some key technologies that used for automatic coding system is explained first, which include that the concept and classification of coding, the significances of coding in the enterprises, the purpose and the varieties of the product coding rule adopted in corporation are discussed, the purpose and meanings of virtual assembly and the feasibility of automatic coding by using of which are analyzed.Then the rules of automatic coding are emphasized, the characterization of which are summarized to finding the internal affiliations, the algorithm of the rules is designed by abstracting and modeling. The algorithm could be implemented by the program language, the establish method of the product tree defined by the user and the principle of storing the part are studied at the same time.In the end, an automatic coding system is developed based on Pro/Engineer, the configuration and the application of Pro/Toolkit is introduced, the recursion function that would be utilized is analyzed. The system framework is brought forward, the system is constructed with module means, among which, the establishment of coding module and parameter module, the implementation of product tree, are studied. The sample of coding for the product automatically is displayed in addition included menu design and the enrollment in Pro/EngineerThe system provided in the paper is a subsidiary tool used to develop rapidly for the enterprises, at the same time, the coding method could give a experiential thought about improving the design efficient for the factory which produce complicated products, and the algorithm could be adjusted by themselves. Furthermore, the coding algorithm studied in the paper could be used with other CAD tools, it offered valuable reference for those corporation which produce complicated products.