Knowledge-based vehicle body conceptual assembly design

Abstract

The paper discusses the architecture of a knowledge-based vehicle body conceptual assembly design system. The proposed system addresses problems when applying knowledge-based techniques to vehicle body design at the conceptual design stage and later stages. The paper mainly gives a proposed framework and organization of the conceptual assembly design system with the help of knowledge-based engineering, where it takes into integrated consideration the assembly sequence, joint configuration, and tolerance allocation in the autobody assembly design process planning. Heuristic knowledge and empirical knowledge play active roles in the generation of the assembly sequence and dimension chain, the configuration of joint types, and the allocation of tolerance limits, and qualitative simulation is knowledge reasoning or rule reasoning with all kinds of rule, criterion, and principle, so that the knowledge-based vehicle assembly design system can improve assembly concept quality by means of qualitative simulation to fulfil the concurrent integration between conceptual design and detail design stages.