Research On The APS-Based Design Knowledge Management And Secondary Development Integration Application

With the globalization process accelerating, productivity increasing at a high speed and quickly development of enterprise informatization, the market environment facing by modern manufacturing enterprise changed dramatically. Product life cycle shortened, the time of delivery period became a main factor of competition. The increasing rate of personalized, various, small amount manufacture is a new challenge. Meanwhile, knowledge contained in products increased a lot which is a new feature of modern product design. It's safe to say that modern product design is a knowledge based, knowledge acquisition centered process. Design is materialization of knowledge and new design is materialization of new knowledge. How much knowledge a design contains is used to assess a design's success or failure. Enterprise development depends on knowledge accumulation and knowledge acquisition.Nowadays, there a trend that product design turns to be at a higher speed and with much more knowledge contained. However, many enterprises are lack of corresponding knowledge management technology. Therefore, they can't respond to the market change quickly. An effective method of knowledge management is strongly required.Meanwhile, with the arrival of knowledge economy, more and more enterprises realized the importance of knowledge which is a kind of invisible resource. The idea of knowledge management emerged.According to the analysis above, this article researches on an APS based design knowledge management method. Meanwhile, joining with Pro/E secondary development technology realizes the seamless integration between design knowledge management and Pro/E, which provides an effective method for the enterprise in design knowledge management. And using the parameterized Pro/E models'quick regeneration feature accelerates product design efficiency. Achievements in this article are as following:Firstly, an APS design knowledge management method is proposed. This method follows the way from design activity to design problem and then to solution to organize and manage the design knowledge in product design. As for APS, A stands for design activity, it's a summation of several design actions of the same goal to achieve a particular function. It's the basic unit of a design process. Design process form from sequential design activities. Therefore design activity is specific and detailed. Its definition has a close relation whit the design object. P stands for design problem. It's the problem that needed to be solved in the design activity. In this article, knowledge is polymerized by design problem which performs as the carrier of knowledge. S stands for solution. It's the solution of the design problem which proposed in the design activity. It's also detailed and can be pure text description or part structure which shows as a parameterized part model.Secondary, Pro/E secondary development is researched. An application to set up part parameterized model solutions is developed. Using this application engineer can set up a 3 dimension model and 2 dimension drawing according to the 3 dimension model in a very convenient way. And through dimension parameters driven method the part model can be regenerated in a short time.Finally, combined whit the achievements mentioned above, a B/S structure APS design knowledge management method based system is developed on the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2005 platform. Meanwhile, seamless integration between the design knowledge management system and Pro/E is achieved by using of Pro/TOOLKIT and Visual C++ MFC technology.