A Database for the Representation of Assembly Features in Mechanical Products

This paper deals with a representation of assembly features. Modeling the product at each stage of the assembly process, taking into account all pertinent geometrical, technological and functional data, distinguishes our model from the ones described in the literature. A representation such as this also greatly contributes to the designing of a system that includes the various stages in the development and manufacture of a product. To reach our goal, we let the user interactively input a set of features that cannot be supported by a solid modeler. The system automatically deduces other features pertaining to faces, parts and subassemblies. Given the object-oriented structure that we chose, the different features can be abstractly represented as object attributes. This can assist the method engineer in the automatic generation of assembly sequences or resources. Examples are given to validate the concept.