A Design for Assembly application with dynamic information retrieval from case database

摘要

Design for Assembly (DFA) is a Concurrent Engineering constituent that gained a lot of attention due to fast and measurable benefits. The main principle of DFA is to foresee assembly problems at the design stage based on the experience regarding functionality, materials and machine availability. The work presented in this paper, named RFA - Redesign for Assembly, adds a way to explicitly register and retrieve experiences as part of the design process. It starts from an initial design, then RFA leads the designer through a detailed assessment towards an improved design according to previous experiences. Experience representation was done using a Group Technology classification concept that helps assign a primary-key for a Case Based Teaching underlying system. A supporting system has been implemented in order to try out RFA. DFA scholars have used RFA and proved that experience retrieval is easily and intuitively incorporated in the design process. The paper presents a study about the DFA methodology, reviews existing solutions (methods and software) from the literature and details the RFA architecture, implementation and tests. RFA shows potential for a new design culture based on knowledge sharing, but also, as a repository for a very valuable asset, i.e. problem-oriented assembly-related design experience.