AN AGENT BASED FRAMEWORK TO AUTOMATICALLY GENERATE 3D CAD MODELS OF CUSTOMER SPECIFIED PRODUCTS

摘要

To survive in today's volatile market, companies are striving to deliver greater quality, more customization, faster response, more innovative designs and lower prices. The new shift in the current market has introduced the concept of mass customization. One of the aspects of mass customization is to provide customers with products that are manufactured to their needs and requirements. To provide such a support requires better integration of customer with different stages of design and manufacturing. Expansion of the Internet provides an opportunity for such an integration, which will need to link design and manufacturing of the company with the customer. In current approaches, customer usually specifies the options and gets the price or simple pictures of the object. In this paper a system is presented, where customer options and size parameters are gathered using the Internet and is used to automatically generate 3D CAD model of the product and then display the 3D model to the customer for feedback. Development of a framework to generate 3D models from user input will require maintaining explicit correspondence among various types of product information from a module perspective. The Internet based system presented in this paper uses templates to automatically generate 3D CAD models of components, assemble them into products and then export VRML tiles that are displayed to the customer.