Assembly Representation Within a Product Data Framework

Recent research at the University of Leeds demonstrated how a product data model can integrate the information required and used during product design and manufacture. The product data framework developed during this research structured assemblies as lists of parts and did not consider information about the relationships between components necessary to support applications such as tolerance analysis and design for assembly. This paper describes how we intend to combine research in assembly representation, functional modeling and data modeling to describe the geometric and functional relationships between components of assemblies. Focus is provided by considering both the design process and the information requirements of a design for assembly analysis