International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 1 Copyright © 200x Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

The skeleton in the multi-level assembly model for top-down innovation design of mechanical product Abstract: This paper presents an improved engineering model extended from our previous work to better support top-down product design. The main characteristics of our new model are: (a) several vital kinds of engineering data for top-down design are captured effectively; (b) the top-down design mode is explicitly supported, i.e., a real-embedment of top-down design in CAD system can be achieved based on this model; (c) as it’s platform-independent (here the platform means CAD systems), adaptation from existing CAD systems won’t be an obstacle. Finally, we also implement a prototype system to prove the correctness and feasibility of our model’s new abilities, and optimistic results are obtained