A single representation to support assembly and process planning in feature-based design machined parts

Abstract

The need for a product model that can support the modelling requirements of a broad range of applications leads to the application of a feature-based model within a computer aided design environment. An important requirement in feature-based design for manufacture is that a single feature representation should be capable of concurrently supporting a number of different applications. Assembly and process planning are seen as two crucial manufacturing applications and a formal structure for their representation in a feature-based design system is presented. This research addresses two basic questions relating to the lack of a unified definition for features and the establishment of a feature-based representation for assembly. Thus the concept of designing with features is extended by incorporating assembly and process planning information with the geometrical and topological details of component parts. A prototype system has been implemented using an object-oriented programming technique which provides a convenient method for adding functionality to the geometric reasoning process of features and the complex relationships between the parts that make up the assembly. The feature-based model is embedded in the ACIS object-oriented solid modeller kernel.

Beyond assembly features: systematic review of the core concepts and perspectives towards a unified approach to assembly information representation

“…An extended review of the feature concept is available in (Sanfilippo and Borgo (2016). Then, this concept allows linking the physical product to its manufacturing information (Iudica et al 1990;Kang and Nnaji 1993;Henderson and Taylor 1993) by communicating geometric and non-geometric aspects of the design and manufacturing of a product (Case and Wan Harun 1999;Zhang and Wang 2006). Even though discrepancies still exist regarding their dependency on geometry (Henderson and Taylor 1993;Sy and Mascle 2011), features are useful abstractions for information exchange (Dartigues et al 2007), since they are understood by users and developers (Kang et al 2002), and can translate low-level into higher-level information for different domains (Di Stefano et al 2004).…”

“…For instance, the intelligent product design and manufacturing (IPDM) applied two types of design features, the micro-features (e.g., form features) and macro-features (e.g., functional features), in a knowledge-based process planning system able to generate assembly sequences and robot task planning (ElMaraghy 1991). Similarly, Case and Wan Harun (1999) used the definition of features as machined volumes (machining features) in an approach that showed the feasibility of using the feature concept in process planning as well as in assembly representation.…”

“…The textual definitions of the assembly feature concept were analyzed to extract the most relevant words, which were compared against the proposed perspectives (i.e., Assembly domain, PDP, stakeholders, product information, information representation) to analyze the assembly information. The 20 (1991,1993), ElMaraghy (1991), Delchambre and Gaspart (1992), Bronsvoort et al (1997Bronsvoort et al ( , 2001, Eng et al (1999), Pham and Dimov (1999), Case and Wan Harun (1999), Bidarra and Bronsvoort (2000), Gupta et al (2001), Noort et al (2002), Bowland et al (2003), Fenves et al (2004), Bronsvoort and Noort (2004), Zhu et al (2010a, b) Gui and Mäntylä (1994), Noort et al (2002), Zha and Du (2002), Yin et al (2003), Bronsvoort and Noort (2004), , No specific concept Tan et al (2002), Hui et al (2007), Lupinetti et al (2016ab, ), Zhang et al (2020) most frequent words in those definitions were identified and related to the proposed perspectives according to the context in which they were employed; the result is shown in Fig. 7.…”

“…Those core concepts have been used in several approaches targeting different assembly-related activities, e.g., assembly sequencing (Sung et al 2001;Ullah et al 2009;Neb and Hitzer 2020), assembly planning (Case and Wan Harun 1999;Bronsvoort and Noort 2004), and virtual assembly (Shyamsundar and Gadh 2001;Zhu et al 2010a;Wang et al 2013;Adamson et al 2019). These approaches have proposed different forms of representing assembly information, ranging from international standards for product information representation (Fenves 2002;Rachuri et al 2006;ISO 2018) to databases (Shah and Rogers 1988; Roy and Liu 1988;Kang and Nnaji 1993), ontologies (Dartigues et al 2007;Fiorentini et al 2007;Barbau et al 2012;Hasan et al 2014a;Huang et al 2015), model-based definitions (Ye et al 2015;Wan et al2016;Zeng et al 2021), among others.…”

An intelligent method to generate liaison graphs for truss structures

“…To generate liaison graphs from digital prototypes automatically, researchers have developed many methods which are mainly based on the shape matching reasoning. With surface relationships on the parts similar with b-rep representation, Case and Harun 10 define and extract assembly features to establish a liaison graph. Linn and Liu 11 construct shape matching relationship via coplanar elements such as points, lines and surfaces.…”