A System for Performing Content-Based Searches on a Database of Mechanical Assemblies

Abstract

The increased use of 3D CAD systems by product development organizations has resulted in large databases of assemblies; this explosion of assembly data will continue in the future. Currently, there are no effective content-based techniques to search these databases. Ability to perform content-based searches on these databases is expected to help the designers in the following two ways. First, it can facilitate reuse of existing assembly designs, and thereby reducing the design time. Second, a lot of useful Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) knowledge is embedded in existing assemblies. Therefore a capability to locate existing assemblies and examine them can be used as a learning tool by the designers to learn from the existing assembly designs and hence transfer the best DFMA practices to new designers. This paper describes a system for performing content-based searches on assembly databases. We identify templates for comprehensive search definitions and describe algorithms to perform content-based searches for mechanical assemblies. We also illustrate capabilities of our system through several examples.