Agent Based Variation Propagation for Collaborative Top-Down Assembly Design

Abstract

The design of a complex mechanical product is usually a top-down process carried out by different teams or designers that are geographically distributed. A systematical variation propagation mechanism is very important to fully support such a design process. In this paper, based on the framework for collaborative top-down assembly design previously proposed by the authors, an agent based approach is presented for addressing variation propagation for collaborative top-down assembly design. The approach achieves variation propagation during the collaborative top-down assembly design through the interaction and cooperation of the agents located at the clients and server. To make the variation propagation automated and intelligent, four kinds of variation reasoning including hierarchical variation reasoning, engineering constraint variation reasoning, feature variation reasoning, and assembly constraint variation reasoning are identified, and the corresponding algorithms are developed and utilized. Meanwhile, a distributed assembly model is put forward to effectively support the design variation propagation for the collaborative top-down assembly design. The approach is implemented and a variation propagation example is given.