Abstract
KEYWORDS:
top-down design, skeleton, Pro/Engineer, product assembly, control
ABSTRACT:
The paper presents a new design methodology that alllows the engineer to control complex assemblies, in an extremly efficient manner. The author proposes an original approach, extending the facilities offered by the classical top down design -that uses the skeleton and the layouts for positioning the components- by adding extra sub-skeletons refering to the machining operations. These sub-skeletons, apart of providing the necessary machining information for the main components, are offering the possibility to link the features of the assembly components in a mannner that ensures the automatic propagation of the required modification over all the assembly, when a change was undertaken at the skeleton level.