Creation of Assembly Models to Support Automated Concept Generation

This paper presents an assembly model process that fully characterizes the structural and flow interactions between artifacts in a product. Reverse engineering techniques were employed during the analysis of thirty-three existing consumer products to arrive at a concise standardization of the modeling process. During the product investigation, four different types of structural interactions were identified. These structural interactions, couple, secure, position and guide, were defined using a standardized vocabulary of functional terms. These four structural interactions are rigorously described in this paper in an effort to outline an assembly model method that is accurate and repeatable. Additionally, flow interactions between components are also characterized within the presented modeling technique. A rough representation of the artifact configuration of a product can also be achieved through placement of the component structures in the model. Analysis of the consumer product set also revealed that a new design tool can be generated using the structural interaction information contained in the described assembly models.