A CAD system for extraction of mating features in an assembly

Purpose - The information and knowledge about a product and its assembly are necessary to generate all feasible assembly sequences of that product. Assemblies contain a very large amount of information and complex relationships. Identifying assembled parts as well as their contact surfaces is very important in design and manufacturing since this information is essential. The problem is to not only make the information available but also use the relevant information for making decisions, especially determination of the optimum assembly sequence. This paper aims to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach - This paper describes a system for processing assembly models and extracting assembly related data using application programming interface (API) of the computer-aided design (CAD) software. These data are used to identify the relationships between different components of an assembly thus encouraging generation of feasible assembly sequences. Findings - Instead of total human interpretation of the assembly design, a direct CAD database interface approach has been proposed to extract the relation with minimal manual involvement. The information extracted is used to generate a list describing the links between the assembled parts, the involved features and the type of link explicitly to facilitate assembly analysis and planning. Originality/value - The methodology of using the API of the CAD modeling package Solid Works, is a novel approach in which the assembly mate information is captured. Instead of total human interpretation of the assembly design, a direct CAD database interface approach has been proposed to extract the relation with minimal manual involvement.