Reusing mechanical engineering design

Design in mechanical engineering is often redesign and involves retrieving similar designs from various integrated design repositories or paper drawings. To support designers, a system must provide access to previous valid designs that satisfy or nearly satisfy requirements, functions, or characteristics, and allow the integration and transformation of the retrieved designs into a new design the meets the new design specifications. Many approaches have been developed in the past to support designers in accessing designs for their new design needs. Most of the existing approaches typically store design documents as files and provide an additional structure to access the documents through the indexing of the entire file and do not offer designers the ability to express more complex retrieval queries or simply queries different from the ones pre-computed in the index. No existing approach appears to offer a real query language to retrieve cases for engineering design in various contexts represented by the geometry and topology of a finished design. In these systems, retrieval queries usually are Boolean expressions of terms consisting of valued attributes as represented through the indices (or pre-computed annotations). In addition, these approaches usually do not provide a framework for design integration (when components extracted from several designs must be integrated to meet the new requirements) as needed to support mechanical engineering design reuse. In this paper, we present an approach to support mechanical design data reuse that exploits constraint databases. This approach provides a real query language that expresses complex queries that retrieve, integrate and transform design data. It relies on the data model through constraints compatible with the standard for the exchange of product model data (STEP), standard for mechanical design data representation.