Modular design supporting system with a step-by-step design approach 2/sup nd/ report: management of the priority information between interfaces

Recently, due to the importance of considering the product life cycle and the dynamic change in the manufacturing paradigm from the current mass production to sustainable production, modular design has become very important. The concept of step-by-step modular design which synchronizes the progress of the design process by using the structure of the graph of a product model, was already proposed in the 1st report. This 2nd report is based on this previous research and developed from two viewpoints; one is the information on the interface model in a graph-described product model, and the other is information processing in stepwise refinement of the interface. In this report, the concept of the priority between each interface is introduced and the priority is described explicitly as the information on the interface. Then this priority information is available for stepwise modular breakdown considering the design intention from the upper design stage to the lower design stage. A prototype system based on this concept has been implemented and some examples are shown in this paper.