CAD Method for Industrial Assembly: Concurrent Design of Products, Equipment and Control Systems

The main objective of this work is to propose specifications and concepts for future computer aided tools (CAD) to be used in the design and control of flexible manufacturing systems for mechanical and electromechanical assemblies.
The main objective of the authors is to deliver specifications and underlying concepts for future computer-aided tools for the design and the control of flexible manufacturing systems for mechanical and electro-mechanical assemblies. This book presents an integrated computer-aided method which supports a concurrent engineering approach for assembled products. This integrated method is divided in several modules which analyse the ease of assembly of a design, the assembly order, the design of an assembly workshop, and the simulation of the workshop taking into account scheduling and flow control. Automatic, semi-automatic and manual utilisations are presented for each module. Communication between design and manufacturing has been emphasised. The environment in this book is a real concurrent engineering one and for the first time the concurrent engineering steps are integrated in a CAD system. The method has been implemented in one of the worlds most used CAD systems: CATIA.