Software Development And Research Methods For Vehicle Seatbelt Anchor Design Based On KBE

Following internationalization of the automotive manufacture and individuation on the auto sale, development on new vehicle is coming to more important station. As is known to everyone, in the development of a new vehicle, most changes are focused on auto-body while chassis and engine often follow the mature technique. To sum up, everyone is doing his best to develop and present new vehicle as fast as could with lowest cost.In the traditional auto-body design flow, designers would spend lots of time and energy on reduplicative work between design project's modification and validation. This is a kind of resources waste and the extended development time would even be viral for manufactures. Computer aided technique has brought designers and manufactures out of the embarrassment somewhat. Nowadays, cooperated design with computer aided technique has been implemented in both auto-body design and parts design. All manufactures want to launch products more quickly and cut down the development cost by shorten product development cycle, while designers hope that their design method is more convenient to update or verify the mechanics so that they could go forward quickly. But generally, there are three defects everyone would meet with:High demand on designer's professional knowledge and experience. To take CAD model creation of auto-body and airframe as example, designers must have an amount of interrelated knowledge and lots of experiences to finish the work on such complex structure. Besides these, they should also master a good skill on the CAD software operation to give a satisfied solution.Lots of complicated manual operation. Because auto-body is such a complex structure, designers would do too much manual operation no matter in CAD or CAE situation. Given one parameter changed, a lot of correlative work would wait in the following sequence. So, even a skillful and experienced designer would waste his time on these repeated operations.Hard to save and reuse knowledge and experience. A skillful and experienced designer often derived from long time effort and mass of resources. Once the designer left, his knowledge and experiences would follow him and left nothing for the replacer. This is of course resources waste and apparently increases product's development cost.Based on discuss above, it could be said how to reuse knowledge is becoming more important. This is exactly what KBE (Knowledge based Engineer) tries to answer. Knowledge Fusion (KF) is a language as KBE solution presented by UG/NX, with which how to describe the knowledge is what should be only cared. Cause of KF language's descriptive and demand-driver characters, users could focus their energy on describing their knowledge, experiences or engineering rules with KF elements"Attribute"and"Class"but not care about the order or relations between them. It would help designers to take knowledge out of their brains and to share it with other people. Glass Regulator Module discussed in this paper does make use of KF to create most of it modeling and implement the functionality of edit."Design and Analysis of Auto Seatbelt Anchor Based on KBE"is just developed based on KBE. It could help general designers to quickly finish the system's parameterized modeling creation, package which would cost designers much time and energies. The knowledge in the module mainly comes from Automotive Design Standard, Industrial criterions and experiences of auto-body designers. There are three main advantages in the module:Application of Wizard UI (User Interface): Wizard UI delivers knowledge on the system design into different"Steps", designers could finish the design work following the UI steps even without knowing why. It loosens the requirement on designers'professional knowledge.Easy for operation: Only work left for designers is selecting geometries and inputting parameters according the cue on step dialog. All other work such as calculation, measure and modeling is finished automatically behind UI. By reducing manual interactive, the module shortens development cycle greatly.KF is more convenient for module functionality extension: most of parameterized modeling of the module is which is implemented with KF language. So no matter to add new geometry or to add new engineering rules, designers just need to add or to edit the existing ones while do little change or nothing on the source code."Design and Analysis of Auto Seatbelt Anchor Based on KBE"is developed on"Unit"platform which is offered by UGS and makes use of multiple development tools such as: C language, UG/Open, KF language, UG/UIStyler and UG/Wizard UI etc.. The requirement of the module is supplied first by GM. After discussing with domestic designers, we determined the final design flow. According to the software engineering standards, Requirement Specification (RS), Functionality Specification (FS) and Design Specification (DS) was finished first. Following work is to program. Finally, the correlative designers give the test on the module functionality and finished the Test Plan (TP).Even the discussion of the paper is all about glass regulator. But first, the development of the module follows UG/NX third-party development standards. Second, structure of glass regulator is kind of complex and refers many different fields. Finally, KF language is used to capture knowledge which coud be reused and shared. Based on the three reasons above, study and development of the module is typical and would be useful for the orther associated development.