| Component layout plays an important role in product design. Practical tools for the general layout process mostly remain at the stages of physical or electronic models with the assistance of manual adjustment and visual feedback. The needs arising for compact and complex products, short cycle time and efficient use of resources justify the development of effective layout automation methods for 3-D components of complex geometry.; This dissertation presents a computational framework for the automated product layout synthesis that integrates an extended pattern search algorithm, the hierarchical octree-based geometric representation, multi-objective formulation, spatial and topological constraint satisfactions, and engineering analyses. The framework is applicable to the placement, routing and configuration of mechanical and electro-mechanical systems. The approach interfaces with commercial CAD packages and handles 3-D objects of complex geometry and with full six degrees-of-freedom. The performance comparison shows that the extended pattern search layout approach is an effective and efficient method through the proper balancing between the deterministic downhill search and random search methods. By taking advantage of the time-saving of the extended pattern search layout method, more accurate geometric or engineering analyses can be incorporated to generate better quality layouts in reasonable time.; The automated layout approach has been applied to a variety of industrial applications such as heat pump layout and routing, automatic transmission layout, truck chassis configuration, and automobile trunk packing. The framework can be readily implemented for other layout applications and further extensions may be introduced to open up potential and new applications. |
