Design Rule Checker for Sheet MetalComponents using Medial Axis Transforms andGeometric
Design Rule Checker is an essential component of design automation and for making design, process planning and manufacturing concurrent. In this paper, a set of algorithms are presented for detecting design violations in sheet metal components. Violations in sheet metal components occur when holes, slots, or other features are too close to one another. These violations, if undetected during design, increase the design life cycle of the product. Thus it is very essential to detect, if not eliminate these violations at the early stages of design. Typically sheet metal components have a number of features serving various purposes which include ventilation and fastening. As the contour of the parts gets complicated and the number of features on the sheet metal part increases it is diicult to check the rules exhaustively as it may lead to combinatorial explosion. 1 The algorithm presented here, uses Medial axis transformation to decompose a given domain thus preventing a combinatorial explosion, and also provides a means to integrate the rule checker with a design adviser.
Feature reasoning for sheet metal components
The objective of this paper is to develop a set of principles for extracting, recognizing and reasoning about features from sheet metal parts which are created in the CAD system. Recognition of such features will enable the automatic evaluation of designs and the development of process plans by among other things, mapping form features to tools needed to produce the form. The principles are developed by studying the face-oriented representations of features and deriving concepts which relate the features geometrically and topologically. Subsequently, the processes that relate to the geometrical forms are used to further uniquely identify the features.
Configuration Tree Solver: A Technology for Automated Design and Configuration
Configuration is a process of generating a definitive description of a product that satisfies a set of specified requirements and known constraints. Knowledge-based technology is an important factor in automation of configuration tasks found in mechanical design. In this paper, we describe a configuration technique that is well suited for configuring "decomposable" artifacts with reasonably well defined structure and constraints. This technique may be classified as a member of a general class of decompositional approaches to configuration. The domain knowledge is structured as a general model of the artifact, an and-or hierarchy of the artifact's elements, features, and characteristics. The model includes constraints and local specialists which are attached to the elements of the and-or-tree. Given the specific configuration requirements, the problem solving engine searches for a solution, a subtree, that satisfies the requirements and the applicable constraints. We describe an application of this approach that performs configuration and design of an automotive component.