REDUCING WORKLOAD IN PRODUCTION DESIGN STAGE BY RULE-BASED AUTOMATION OF CAD

摘要

For a long time in the shipbuilding industry, assembly and fabrication information was reflected as drawings and reports generated by the design department and handed over to the construction field. Since the 1990s, it has been common practice to print such assembly and fabrication information, called annotations, on the raw steel plate/profile (structural parts) directly, using CNC printing devices. The annotations represent object/assembly names, assembled mounting angles, bending machines, bevel information, work center, and so forth. These annotations have become indispensable for the current deliverables by helping to improve the efficiency of the construction field. Initial versions placed a burden on the designer, who had to manually input annotations into a CAD system. In this paper, the authors describe how a production designer's work can be reduced and automated. By implementing the rule-based automation of CAD to generate annotations, the current work flow can be analyzed to standardize work processes. In particular, field actions need to be determined based on multiple considerations, such as grinder attribution based on compartments; bending machines based on the curve and pre-welding; and work centers that must be assembled. We introduced a steel part pre-process service called production routing. We achieved rule-based automation by using the relationship between structural parts; structural parts and compartments; and structural parts and assembly hierarchies that exist uniquely in the CAD system. The results confirm that rule-based automation results in dramatic improvement for production design work.