A graph-based approach and an interactive tool for preliminary digital prototyping
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SHORT ORIGINAL PAPER
A graph-based approach and an interactive tool for preliminary digital prototyping Ferdinando Vitolo1
· Stanislao Patalano1 · Antonio Lanzotti1
Received: 12 March 2020 / Accepted: 7 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Design process is usually based on past experiences and best practises which compose the company know-how. The challenge is to identify common patterns in the design solutions generated for different design problems. The present paper focuses on the identification of product patterns by using a graph-based approach. It deals with the designing of automotive gearboxes and with the development of an approach and a software tool aimed to support preliminary design and CAD modelling activities in gearbox designing. The approach is applied to two different architectures of manual transverse gearboxes characterized by two and three shafts. It aims at the identification of common design features through the detection of the directed graphs matching. A Matlab software tool for gearbox preliminary design is implemented according to the detected common features. The proposed approach and the developed software tool provide an effective way to keep and re-use company know-how, especially in the context of large automotive companies. Keywords KBE · Product pattern · Graph theory · CAD modelling · Graphical user interfaces
1 Introduction Design process is often based on company best practises and know-how. Some specific design contexts are deeply specialised and make use of dedicated approaches [3]. In many other cases, the common design phase is strictly based on company knowledge and it doesn’t start from scratch. Knowledge managing techniques and approaches, in terms of data acquisition, organisation and re-use, take on a key role. By tackling a new problem, the main objective is the re-use of past experiences, as well as past solutions, for adopting or adapting to the new problem [9]. The identification and organization of product pattern enable an easier re-using process.
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Ferdinando Vitolo [email protected]
The present paper focuses on the identification of product patterns by using a graph-based approach [5–7] in order to support the design activity. In particular, the use of directed graphs [2] as data manager improves the management and re-use of company know-how, according to a KBE point of view, and allows the creation of an easy-to use Graphical User Interface (GUI). The GUI is the software tool that allows designer to identify relations between design features, to manage and distribute engineering knowledge and to improve standardization within design processes. The approach is applied to two gearboxes characterized, respectively, by a two-shafts and three-shafts architecture, with a particular focus on the identification of common design features belonging to different gearbox architectures, in order to accomplish the geometric modelling of mechanical assembly and support the preliminary phase of dimensioning as well as the updating of CAD models during r
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