No abstract

The core activities of a bicycle manufacturer are design, engineering analysis, and manufacturing. Therefore, it is important to develop a configuration design system for bicycles in order to automate the design process and facilitate the use of design data in engineering analysis and manufacturing. In this paper, we present a method to develop a bicycle configuration design system based on the part-shape information model. The proposed method enables the construction of a CAD library using modeling functions with equations and parameters that are common to most 3D mechanical CAD systems. Furthermore, the part-shape information model ensures the independence between the configuration design system and the library, making it possible to extend the CAD library flexibly without changing the system architecture.

Article history: A library of parametric CAD models should be provided for the reuse of design data in configuration design. Mechanical products have many options and parameters, which in turn, require a large number of CAD models for configuration designs. Existing methods for library construction are limited in their ability to decrease the number of CAD models and ensureindependency between theconfiguration design system and the library. To solve these problems, we propose a method thatcontrolsa CAD library based on part-shape information model, and also present its technical details. To verify the proposed method, a CAD library for bicycles was constructed and design modification experiments usinga prototype part-shape controller were performed. From the experiments, we found that the proposed method can effectively decrease the required number of CAD models by reusingmodels for configuration designs.