Assembly-oriented design in automotive engineering

To be competitive on the global market, carmakers have cut lead times in passenger car development to the bone. At the same time both the product complexity and the customer's demands with regard to quality are continuously rising. Various new strategies and tools are currently being explored to cope with these challenges: simultaneous/concurrent engineering, front-loaded development, and knowledge-/feature-based parametric design to name just a few. Current design processes in automotive engineering as well as the engineering IT systems deployed to support them are largely single part oriented. Assembly design is seen as a process step following sequentially after part design, and assembly information is not managed in the same quality and quantity as part information. Assembly-oriented design (AOD) is an approach which breaks with these traditional paradigms of part orientation. Focusing on a parallelisation of assembly design and part design as well as on an integrated and consistent information management for assembly information right from the beginning, AOD strives to realise significant benefits throughout the product life-cycle. The objective of this paper is to elaborate on this approach with a focus on the special situation in automotive engineering