CAD Software Development Of Arm-style Glass Regulator Based On KBE

Following internationalization of the automotive manufacture and individuation onthe auto sale, development on new vehicle is coming to more important station.As isknown to everyone, in the development of a new vehicle, most changes are focused onauto body while chassis and engine often follow the mature technique.At the sametime, to struggle against the drastic competition coming from the international market,every automotive manufacturer is trying to shorten the development cycle on newvehicle. To sum up, everyone is doing his best to develop and present new vehicle asfast as could with lowest cost.In the traditional auto body design flow, designers would spend lots of time andenergy on reduplicative work between design project's modification and validation.This is a kind of resources waste and the extended development time would even beviral for manufactures. Computer aided technique has brought designers andmanufactures out of the embarrassment somewhat. Nowadays, cooperated design withcomputer aided technique has been implemented in both auto body design and partsdesign.All manufactures want to launch products more quickly and cut down thedevelopment cost by shorten product development cycle, while designers hope thattheir design method is more convenient to update or verify the mechanics so that theycould go forward quickly. But generally, there are three defects everyone would meetwith:High demand on designer's professional knowledge and experience. To take CADmodel creation of auto body and airframe as example, designers must have an amountof interrelated knowledge and lots of experiences to finish the work on such complexstructure. Besides these, they should also master a good skill on the CAD softwareoperation to give a satisfied solution.Lots of complicated manual operation. Because auto body is such a complexstructure, designers would do too much manual operation no matter in CAD or CAEsituation. Given one parameter changed, a lot of correlative work would wait in thefollowing sequence. So, even a skillful and experienced designer would waste his timeon these repeated operations.Hard to save and reuse knowledge and experience.Askillful and experienceddesigner often derived from long time effort and mass of resources. Once the designerleft, his knowledge and experiences would follow him and left nothing for the replacer.This is of course resources waste and apparently increases product's development cost.Based on discuss above, it could be said how to reuse knowledge is becoming moreimportant. This is exactly what KBE (Knowledge based Engineer) tries to answer.Knowledge Fusion (KF) is a language as KBE solution presented by UG/NX, withwhich how to describe the knowledge is what should be only cared. Cause of KFlanguage's descriptive and demand driver characters, users could focus their energy ondescribing their knowledge, experiences or engineering rules with KF elements "Attribute"and"Class"but not care about the order or relations between them. Itwould help designers to take knowledge out of their brains and to share it with otherpeople. Glass Regulator Module discussed in this paper does make use of KF to createmost of it modeling and implement the functionality of edit.Glass regulator system has a complex structure; when it's working, kinematics isinvolved; even interference check should be considered. Design of glass regulatorsystem and its package is always a kind of complicated work. So it is more typical tostudy."Glass Regulator Module Based on KBE"is just developed based on KBE. Itcould help general designers to quickly finish the system's parameterized modelingcreation, package, movement analysis, interference check and pressure analysis whichwould cost designers much time and energies. The knowledge in the module mainlycomes fromAutomotive Design Standard, Industrial criterions and experiences ofauto body designers. There are three main advantages in the module:Application of Wizard UI (User Interface): Wizard UI delivers knowledge on thesystem design into different"Steps", designers could finish the design work followingthe UI steps even without knowing why. It loosens the requirement on designers'professional knowledge.Easy for operation: Only work left for designers is selecting geometries andinputting parameters according the cue on step dialog.All other work such ascalculation, measure and modeling is finished automatically behind UI. By reducingmanual interactive, the module shortens development cycle greatly.UDF created with KF is more convenient for module functionality extension: mostof parameterized modeling of the module is created with UDF which is implementedwith KF language. So no matter to add new geometry or to add new engineering rules,designers just need to add new UDF or to edit the existing ones while do little changeor nothing on the source code."Glass Regulator Module Based on KBE"is developed on"Unit"platform whichis offered by UGS and makes use of multiple development tools such as: C language,UG/Open, KF language, UG/UIStyler and UG/Wizard UI etc.. The requirement of themodule is supplied first by GM.After discussing with domestic designers, wedetermined the final design flow.According to the software engineering standards,Requirement Specification (RS), Functionality Specification (FS) and DesignSpecification (DS) was finished first. Following work is to program. Finally, thecorrelative designers give the test on the module functionality and finished the TestPlan (TP).Even the discussion of the paper is all about glass regulator. But first, thedevelopment of the module follows UG/NX third party development standards.Second, structure of glass regulator is kind of complex and refers many different fields.Finally, KF language is used to capture knowledge which coud be reused and shared.Based on the three reasons above, study and development of the module is typical and would be useful for the orther associated development.