Modeling and knowledge representation of machine element design for intelligent design support systems

Considerations on product design and development in manufacturing industry are remarkably increasing in recent years. How to improve the intelligent productivity of design business has become a pressing need for enterprises. It is not only to concern with the geometric information like drawing, more important thing to be considered for a designer is to treat with the existing design knowledge. But many general-purposed CAD systems are good to support the works like drawing but pay less attention on the features of design activities and not effective to processing and support of the design knowledge. Thus, there has been a considerable growth of interest in knowledge-based design support systems. Based on object-oriented methodologies and the attribute-oriented modeling paradigms, we have proposed the assembly structure as a design object model and the design space for design problem representation. This paper focuses the discussion on the machine element modeling and the knowledge representation for the construction of a knowledge-based design support system. We also verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through the application examples.