Automatic assisted design for assembly (AssistedDfA_icon).

The design of mechanical assembly products has become a complex task in which design engineers have to rely on Computer Aided Design, software to correctly assess pricing and performance of their product. However, unlike performance and cost, assembly-related knowledge is hard to formalize and current commercial CAD tools do not provide adequate support to evaluate assemblability in an accurate and company specific way. This means companies still have to rely on iterative interactions between the designers and assembly experts, during which the assemblability of a product is evaluated manually based on check lists and expert knowledge. Due to this iterative process, assembly issues in the design result in an increased development cost and time, which is detrimental for company competitiveness. This problem is especially relevant with the ever-increasing complexity of assembly products and the current tendency of mixing human operators and collaborative robots (cobots) in the assembly processes, in which design flaws become more likely, further emphasizing the need for supporting tools. The goal of the project is to substantially reduce the time to market and development cost of mechanical assembly products by incorporating automated assemblability evaluation in the early stages of product design. This goal will be achieved by investigating and implementing algorithmic methods capable of interact with the designer by means of CAD software and 3D visualization tools. By allowing the designer to evaluate the assemblability in the early stages, the number of design re-iterations will be strongly reduced. AnSyMo Group (MICSS Lab) in Department of Computer Science, University of Antwerp is responsible for work package 2. The goal of this work package is to address the lack of a standardized model to capture assembly knowledge by developing a framework and methodology to formalize assembly information into a knowledge-base. AnSyMo and CodesignS will collect requirements from the manufacturing partners (Daikin, Voxdale, Alberts and Siemens) with the aim to extend the meta-model developed in the PACo SBO project to enable the formalization of assembly knowledge across the three levels of the technical strategy. Additionally, AnSyMo will develop a programmatic interface (API) to make the knowledge-base accessible from within a CAD environment and provide a Domain-specific Language (DSL) to define custom DfA rules programmatically (via the API).

Keywords:EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Disciplines:System software and middleware, Computer-aided design

Project type:Collaboration project