Visualization techniques for product change and product modelling in complex design

摘要

Complex products, such as airplanes or helicopters, can contain thousands of different components, connected in different ways designed by a large and disparate multidisciplinary team each using their own tools and representations. Each tool, such as a CAD system, provides a detailed view of a particular type of information, for example geometry. However no current tool provides a high level abstract overview of the product, which is required for many design decisions, forcing designers to wade through large of amount of detailed data in different representations. Industry needs visualization techniques, which allow designers to interact with the data at different levels of abstraction, to gain both an overview and a detailed understanding of a product.