An assembly oriented design and optimization approach for mechatronic system engineering

Abstract

Today, companies involved in product development in the "Industry 4.0" era, need to manage all the necessary information required in the product entire lifecycle, in order to optimize as much as possible the product-process integration. In this paper, a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach is proposed, in order to facilitate product-process information exchange, by considering design constraints and rules coming from DFMA (Design For Manufacturing and Assembly) guidelines. Indeed, anticipating these manufacturing and assembly constraints in product design process, reduces both costs and Time To Market (TTM), and avoids to repeat mistakes. The paper details the application of multi-objective optimization algorithms after considering DFMA constraints in a PLM approach. A case study using an original mechatronic system concept is presented, and improved by considering product-process integrated design, optimization and simulation loops, using numerical optimization and FEM (Finite Element Method) methods and tools.