A cad assembly management model: Mates reconciliation and change propagation

Abstract

Nowadays, companies are developing more and more collaborative projects, and hence the need to exchange data with many partners, contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and customers. So, to establish successful collaborations, they must ensure the relevance, coherence, and especially the security of exchanged data. But the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems still have gaps that need to be corrected in order to improve the productivity of the design process: they offer few solutions to maintain data consistency within the digital model. Adding to that poor management of changes, the user has to manage the consequences of each change manually. This research explores the role of mates’ assembly, as defined in CAD systems, as a key to maintaining the links between parts in the assembly. In this work, we propose the CAD Assembly Management Model that is based on reference elements, in order to maintain mates between CAD entities when a part is modified by a partner and then reinserted into the assembly CAD, and then propagate changes.