Design structural matrix (DSM) has become a modeling and analytical tool for complex systems in the researches and practices of many areas. However, building DSM faces great difficulties, because the decomposition of each product and the different interpretation of the structural relationship are difficult to build in a standard model. This makes it difficult to realize the rapid generation of DSM and shorten its product design cycle. This paper introduces a new automatic DSM generation system based on CAD model. Firstly, the mates feature information of the top-level component in the structural feature tree of the CAD model in the SolidWorks platform is extracted by SolidWorks API technology. The extracted information is then arranged in a certain order and stored in the database. Secondly, the geometric relationship between the assembled components is analyzed in order to evaluate the degree of the influence of various types of mates on the connection relationship between the components. Thus, the corresponding rules of analysis and comparison are set up. Finally, the design of the automatic DSM generation system was successfully accomplished in Visual Basic. Meanwhile, some CAD models are used as examples to verify the feasibility and reliability of the developed system.

 

design structure matrix (DSM), feature extraction, automatic generation, mate rules, 3D model

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