Assembly solving for neutral re-imported product models

Abstract

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) product data integration is essential for applications in Computer Aided Engineering /Manufacturing (CAE/CAM). The data integration problem becomes acute when the geometric modeling work is outsourced for a project. These geometries will then be imported for the project. The product design is based on a recursive method which requires that several revised imported geometry models have to be re-imported into the Target CAD System (TCS). These re-imported models can be difficult to handle, particularly for Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) companies. The iterative nature of the product design requires that several operations be performed on the re-imported files, even if the first import has been dealt with. In this article, the author discusses two methodologies for integrating the data of re-imported models. The proposed approaches involve the use of exchangeable persistent identifiers for the imported geometry file, which have to be included and shared for every revision of a particular imported geometry file. This is in contrast to history free vector comparisons based on entity vertices for finding the required reference information of a particular constraint. The proposed methods may reduce the lead time that is wasted on fixing the re-imported geometries.