Knowledge-based approach and system for assembly oriented design,Part I: the approach

Assembly is one of the most important stages for product development. Assembly-oriented design (AOD) is a new approach to designing assemblies, which uses a number of design and analysis tools to help the designer plan out and analyze candidate assembly schemes prior to having detailed knowledge of the geometry of the parts. Using this approach, many assembly schemes can be inexpensively evaluated for their ability to deliver the important characteristics of the final product. This research proposes a knowledge-based approach and develops an expert design system to support top-down design for assembled products. The presentation of research report is divided into two parts: the knowledge-based approach (Part I) and the knowledge-based expert design system (Part II). This paper is the first part of the report (Part I), which mainly proposes a knowledge-based approach and framework for intelligent assembly oriented design. The proposed approach focuses on the integration of product design, assemblability analysis and evaluation, and design for assembly with economical analysis. It differs from the existing approaches adopting the part-first bottom-up modeling technique, in which a hybrid model related to design problem-solving including function–behavior–structure model, feature-based geometric model, and parametric constraint model is used as a comprehensive intelligent framework for assembly modeling and design in a top-down manner from the conceptual level to the detailed level. Through the use of intelligent approach and framework, concurrent engineering knowledge can be effectively incorporated into the assembly design process, and a knowledge-based expert design system can be implemented.