Research in Large Assembly Management Methods

摘要

Large assembly management is a burgeoning problem which is encountered in all the automotive industries. As the vehicle assemblies of projects moves towards the fruition stage its size becomes more than 50GB. It thus becomes very monolithic to manage, making easy tasks such as making minor changes in the assembly or performing analysis extremely difficult to perform, moreover the huge assembly size alone is not the only problem but even the presence of several other components in the assembly tend to hinder any task that is to be performed. First method to manage the size of large assemblies in CATIA is by using Load as CATIA Graphical Representation (CGR) which is an option available in TeamCenter Integration CATIA developed by EB solutions. CGR is a light weight format which reduces the size of large assemblies, hence shows significant improvement in any operations performed in CATIA and also greatly reduces the loading time. Second method to stall these issues from surfacing is by implementing spatial query in the company's standard operation procedure. Spatial query is a tool which is available in the Digital Mock-up Navigator workbench of CATIA which allows the user to make a selection (a choice of a part or a product in the assembly), around the vicinity of which components are selected and activated as per the user specified constraints of accuracy and clearance. A caveat of spatial query tool is that for "CATIA V5R21" the tool shows some unexpected results when working with smaller assemblies. Both of the above mentioned tools can be simultaneously used hence influencing and improving the performance of the software itself. Holistically these tools are very effective and can be instrumental in managing large assembly datum for the companies.