Flexible Automation and Integrated Manufacturing 1994

ISBN Print: 978-1-56700-018-4

IDAM: AN ARCHITECTURE FOR AN INTEGRATED DFM/DFA SYSTEM

DOI: 10.1615/FAIM1994.410
pages 409-418

Abstract

At the Belgian Research Centre of the Metalworking industry (WTCM/CRIF) an architecture for an "Integrated Design for Assembly and Manufacture" is being developed for use in the area of mechanical product design. IDAM integrates both DFM and DFA applications in one architecture with an interactive link to a parametric solid modeller. This allows to optimize, in the early stages of design, a product for both manufacture and assembly aspects. A Boothroyd like analysis technique allows to evaluate and reduce the assembly cost. DFM applications analyze the producibility and the cost of products for a given manufacturing environment. DFM-tools combine feature based design with automatic feature recognition and CAPP to automatically extract the required input from the CAD-model. The generic aspects of IDAM's product models are STEP compliant and support to analyze and compare at the same time multiple versions of a product. This paper describes the major concepts of the architecture illustrated by an example for the design of a compressor.