Research On The Key Technologies Of Collaborative Design For Mold & Die

Die design is a series of activities which integrate engineering technologies, methods, tools & staffs, and put them into practice. It is the embodiment of core assets for an enterprise. Tooling industry in China so far is still mainly relying on the experience of designers. As a result, a set of dies is always designed with high cost, long delivery time but low reliability. Faced with fierce global competition, how to make full use of existing resources to carry out efficient and high-quality design to meet customer demands is beccoming an important issue for tooling industry in China. The philosophy of collaborative design is to integrate the resources of the enterprise, coordinate the design activities among groups through information technology, ultimately bring enterprises to a more competitive level. Therefore, this paper carries out the research on the theory, method and implementation of collaborative design for mold & die.Constructing a collaborative design system faces many critical problems to solve, group awareness is thereinto the core issue, which is made up of information sharing, information exchanging and information synchronyzing. According to the diversity and dynamic of information, a hybrid sharing model is introduced to support different software systems, which combied traditional CAD systems with network applications. Because of the difference performance of various formatted information during network transmission, several network protocals are encapsulated to achieve real-time information exchanging.Die deisgn is a complicated process, its influencing factors are summarized into task, organization, resource and product. With these four elements, a process model of collaborative design for mold & die is estibilished. After that, an integrated information model is presented whereby the functional requirements from collaborative design for mold & die. In order to effectively coordinate the communication and sharing activities amoung groups, a four-tier coordinating mechanism is designed to support a platform-independent collaborative design system.Based on the analysis of information asynchronousness during collaborative design, role-based access mechanism is brought into collaborative deisgn system. After combining with the assembly tree for a set of dies, a synthetical controlling mechanism for information synchronousness is built. Through assembly tree binding with tasks, tasks binding with roles, and roles binding with engineers, all the information during the design process is controlled and synchronized in a safe and consistent way.Die design is a creative process based on rich experience and knowledge, which includes the inheritance, integration, innovation and management towards knowledge. The advantage and disadvantage of current method of knowledge representation are firstly reviewed, then a uniform new knowledge representation model for die design, namely knowledge cell, is presented. And each element in it is defined by XML. On this basis, how to capture, organize and manage knowledge is discussed. The projected-based coding polymerization, the parameter-driven method, the rule-driven method and the case-driven method are developed to address knowledge fusion issues.Finally, according to the foregoing analysis, the architecture and functionality of a collaborative design system for mold & die are established, and its design workflow is defined. Furthermore, a collaborative design system for mold & die is achieved to support UG-based applications and Web-based applications. Its validity is verified through an example scenario of progressive die design.