Maintaining consistency between CAD elements in collaborative design using association management and propagation

The complete definition of a product often requires the collaboration of various partners. Data sharing and exchange between partners has thus become an important task throughout a product's entire life cycle. Even while subsets of the product definition are exchanged (as work packages) and modified by various partners, the global product definition must remain consistent. This paper focuses on maintaining consistency between Computer-Aided Design (CAD) work packages and the global product Digital Mock-Up (DMU). The approach is designed to ensure better management of the associations between objects when a work package is extracted from the global DMU, modified by a partner, sent back to the originator and then re-inserted into the global DMU, which must be modified in turn so as to maintain consistency. To this end, we propose an association management model for the digital mock-up (Digital Mock-up Association Management Model, DMU-AMM) that transposes the associations that exist between a DMU and a work package, including package extraction and modifications, to ultimately guide the evolution of the DMU so as to reconcile the associations between a modified DMU and the modified work package and there by maintain consistency.