The Development Of The Intelligent Layout Design Prototype System

With the development of the society and economy, the market puts forward a higher request to the manufacturers. On the premise of providing high quality products, the manufacturers have to respond rapidly to the changes of the market and the demands of the customers, especially for the multi-variety and low-volume bus manufacturers. The manufacturers have to shorten the development time, reduce the cost. The overall layout design of bus body plays an important role in the development of the bus. It influences the quality of the product directly. Therefore, it will be great significant to manufacturers to use modern technology. This dissertation researches on the intelligent design system of the overall layout design, which is supported by Research and Application of Auto and Parts Digital Design and Manufacturing Technology, a project (07-D-017) from Jiangsu provincial Six Talent Peaks and an innovation fund project (07C26143201357) from national science and technology department.First of all, this thesis researches on the key technologies in the overall layout design of bus body, such as CAD, KBE and Object-Oriented Technology. Then with the characteristics of the overall layout design, it analyzes the requirements of the system. According to the requirements, it defines the target and the main functions, and then compartmentalizes the system into different functional modules; hence the main framework of the system is set up. Based on the analysis of the development and function requirements of the system, it firstly sets up and describes the overall layout design system, and then it analyzes the requirements of the system with typical examples, and sets up the use-case model considering user requirements. Then based on the use-case model, with UML (United Modeling Language), it describes the framework model, dynamic behavior model and the whole system model.Otherwise, this thesis sets up the rule database and instance database, and finishes the coding design work of the parts in the bus body overall layout design. It also researches the parameterization technology, and establishes the parameterization instance databank of typical parts. Meanwhile, it researches the key points of further development technology of CATIA, and with the help of Visual Basic and Access, it realizes the development of the system and provides the operating process.The intelligent design system integrates three modules:system management module, knowledge base management module and general layout design module. The system can use the stored instances or rules to guide and help designers choose reasonable parameters and quickly establish the new layout of bus body. Moreover the designers can pay more attention to the product’s innovation. The development of the intelligent system provides a new method for the realization of the rapid development of the product, shorten the exploit period and reduce the cost. Furthermore, the system can extracts all kinds of involved knowledge about body layout, especially the valuable experience of engineers into the knowledge base for the accumulation of knowledge and inheritance.