Ebook Supporting Constraint-Aided Conceptual Design from First Principles in Autodesk Inventor
Engineering conceptual design can be regarded as that phase of the engineering de-sign process during which the designer takes a specification for a product to be de-signed and generates many broad solutions for it. Each of these broad solutions is generally referred to as a scheme [7]; however, in this paper we will interchangeably use the terms scheme, design and concept. It is generally accepted that conceptual design is one of the most critical phases of the product development process. It has been reported that more than 75% of a product’s total cost is dictated by decisions made during the conceptual phase of design and that poor conceptual design can never be compensated for at the detailed design stage [10].
The technology presented here has many features that are crucial for supporting designers during the conceptual phase of design. For example, designers can specify an initial statement describing the desired properties of the required artifact. The designer is free to modify this at any time by adding/removing constraints. Further-more, the designer has the freedom to approach the design process in any way he wishes.
The prototype ensures consistency amongst the designer’s decisions and can explain why inconsistencies have occurred. Finally, designers prefer to use tools which are familiar to them and, therefore, any additional tools that a designer is ex-pected to use must have a “look-and-feel” similar to those they already use. It was these considerations that set the agenda for the work reported here.
This paper presents a prototype constraint-based computer-aided design (CAD) technology that can be used to support designers working in the early stages of de-sign. The CAD technology has, at its core, a constraint filtering system based on generalized arc-consistency processing [3] and backtrack search.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents an overview of the relevant literature. Section 3 presents an overview of the theory of conceptual design upon which the prototype is based. Section 4 presents a summary of some of the important features of the CAD system. Section 5 presents a walk-through the current prototype, describing in some detail how a scheme can be developed and configured by the designer. In Section 6 a number of concluding remarks are made.
Download
PDF Ebook Supporting Constraint-Aided Conceptual Design from First Principles in Autodesk Inventor
Posted in :
