A case study in top-down collaborative assembly design

Abstract

The top-down collaborative assembly design can greatly facilitate concurrency of the product design while improve product development efficiency and decrease its cost, but the study on it can't be found currently. In this paper, a case study taking the reducer as an example is carried out to simulate an environment of the whole product design process. The concrete phases of assembly design process are described. The main design phases include the concept design model construction, task assignment, key component structure parameter calculation, original key component geometric modeling and the detail assembly design. Based on the assembly design process and the cooperator activity diagrams, the characteristics and demands are discussed about the product design models, assembly features representation, information management and transmission, collaborative parameter calculation and the system architecture construction. Some issues which must be resolved and its resolving methods for realization of the top-down collaborative assembly design system are presented. This work is instructive for developing feasible top-down collaborative assembly design system.