A Grammatical Approach to Support Real-Time Design of Customized Products

In order to support design of customized products requires generating models of the customized product, performing analysis of these customized products to determine feasibility, and optimization to increase performance. Internet based mass customization systems can be used to not only gather information from the customer, but also to provide real-time feed-back to the customer with product model and analysis information. Consequently, the design analysis, evaluation and optimization need to be automated and enhanced to enable operation over the internet. In this paper product family architecture information are first categorized and then utilized to develop a grammatical approach that captures both configuration and scaling information for entire range of possible customized products to generate detail CAD and FEA models. Analysis, selection of components, and optimization are automatically performed on the models of user-customized products. Solid model of the customized product, along with analysis results, are shown back to the user in real-time as feedback. The proposed setup is demonstrated through the use of a bicycle frame family.Copyright © 2005 by ASME