Series Models Based Fast Variational Design

Parametric modeling technology, as an effective variational design technique, is widely used in industry and academia nowadays. With the help of parametric modeling technology, users can firstly construct the parametric model, and then generate the variation model through parameter modification, which brings great advantages for family product design. However, with more and more variations are needed for family product design, i.e., the variations for family product design include not only the product parameters but also the product topological structure, it is not enough for variational design only based on parametric change. Therefore, this paper put forward an efficient way based on series models to support flexible and different variational design.The main research works of this paper are listed as follows:(1) A new approach to generate the common feature set between two different models is proposed. In this way, the initial common features are obtained by means of solving max-common sub-graph of two different feature relational graphs, and are verified to produce the final common feature set.(2) A new way to generate the maximal feature set of the model series. Based on the common feature set, the maximal feature set for a series of modes is generated quickly through three automatic operations include location constraints determination, feature scale judgment and feature addition.(3) A new variational design method is proposed to create a new model based on maximal feature set. Both feature deleting and parameter changing are applied to the maximal feature-based model to generate the required model.Based on the above researches, a fast variational design system is developed through the secondary development of Pro/E. The results show that the new model can be created in an efficient way based on the historical model series.