Using Constraint Programming to Simplify the Task of Specifying DFX Guidelines

Increasingly, it is being realised 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 companyspecific 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 integrating the Galileo6 language with an electronics design CAD package called Visula. We describe some aspects of the integration and show the functionality of the system. We report on the experiences of one of the user companies in the ESPRIT consortium, and conclude by discussing our findings. ∗The work reported here was funded by the European Commission under ESPRIT project number 20501, with acronym CEDAS