Using the Expressive Power of Constraint Programming to Simplify the Task of Specifying DFX Guidelines 2

Increasingly, it is being realized that success in manufacturing requires integration between the various phases of the product life cycle. One of the key aspects of this integration is that, during the design of an artifact, due consideration should be given to facilitating the down-stream phases of the life-cycle. This is frequently known as “Design for X” (or DFX), where the X ranges over such issues as manufacturability, servicability and so on. Vendors of leading CAD software have started to incorporate DFX features into their packages. In addition, vendors have discovered from customer feedback that engineering companies require flexibility as well as functionality: companies which use CAD packages want to specify their own DFX guidelines as well as, or even instead of, relying on standard DFX guidelines supplied by the CAD vendors. If engineers from user companies are to augment CAD packages with company-specific guidelines, it is important that a language be provided which simplifies this task as much as possible. We are developing a language for this purpose, based on the computational paradigm of constraints. The language, called Galileo6, is intended to be generic in two senses: it can be used to encode guidelines from any product domain and guidelines expressed in it can be applied to designs encoded in a variety of CAD formats. In this paper, we report on an ESPRIT-funded project in which we are linking the Galileo6 language to an electronics design CAD package called Visula. We overview the basic concepts of Galileo6 and demonstrate its utility by showing how it can be used to encode some Design for Assembly guidelines provided by one of the partners in the ESPRIT project. These guidelines have been successfully applied to commercial PCB designs provided by a company involved in our ESPRIT consortium but, in order to respect commercial confidentiality, in this paper we use a design from an electronics magazine for the purposes of illustration. 1Printed Circuit Board Using the Expressive Power of Constraint Programming to Simplify the Task of Specifying DFX Guidelines2 Marc van Dongen, Barry O’Sullivan and James Bowen Department of Computer Science UCC, Cork, Ireland {dongen|osullb|J.Bowen}@cs.ucc.ie