Impact of Virtual Reality Simulation Tools on DFA and Product Development Process

Product development focuses now on Concurrent Engineering aspects. This requires the consideration of all skill constraints contributing to the product life cycle: mechanical design, manufacture, Assembly/Disassembly (A/D), ergonomics, etc. To this end, DFX (Design For X) methods have been developed. Usually, the A/D studies based on DFA (Design For Assembly) software tools have a semi or fully automatic character and allow a quantitative assessment of the product from an A/D point of view. Moreover, such aspects as diversity and complexity of parts and A/D operations, fast and direct multi-criteria optimizations during the design, etc. are hardly considered using current DFX methods. In order to help the designer analyze the A/D or maintenance process of a product as well as to ease decision-making, new methods based on a direct assessment of a human being throughout the A/D operation simulation have been recently developed. Thus, a method discussed in this paper is based on Virtual Reality (VR) tools used in the A/D and design contexts. Hence, various approaches for A/D analysis are discussed in the present paper. To this end, the interest of the use of VR tools for qualitative/quantitative A/D studies of complex systems for collaborative design, the possible use of virtual simulations during different phases of the product development are showed. Virtual A/D assessment methods are particularly interesting in the case of A/D analysis of complex mechanisms containing deformable parts as presented in this paper. The proposed method is illustrated by different examples of A/D tasks to demonstrate an impact of the use of VR tools on the development of DFA and design analysis methods.