Research On The Integration System Of Aided Fixture Design Based On PDM

With the development of computer science, many CAX systems have been developed and used widely in mechanical and manufacturing engineering. The computer aided fixture design system is one kind of these systems. It has become an important method to improve the production efficiency to integrate the CAFD system with other systems. In order to meet the corporation's requirement, the author made a research on the integration of CAFD, CAPP and PDM, based on an integrated platform—PDM. A software package has been developed to realize the aim of integration.First, the reason and the necessity of integration were analyzed. The structures and functions of CAFD/CAX were discussed, and a framework of integration system was proposed. On this base, the method of abstracting the information from a CAPP system was studied. The fixture feature was abstracted through the feature identification and the feature mapping. The integration of CAFD/CAPP was realized with the XML technique. At the same time, the integration of CAFD/PDM is another important factor of the integration system, so the interfaces between PDM and CAFD were designed as well. From the viewpoint of information integration and process integration, the integration of PDM/CAFD was discussed. The fixture configuration and the similarity index method for fixture components were analyzed. Finally, a prototype system named PDM-CAFD was developed. The interfaces and the modules were also programmed. This system realized the integration of CAFD/CAX in some degree.