Virtual assembly and tolerance analysis for collaborative design

Virtual assembly and tolerance analysis are effective tools to avoid assembly conflicts between components designed by different CAD teams during collaborative product design. This paper develops a virtual assembly and tolerance analysis system supporting collaborative product design and puts forward a component model expression method based on assembly ports as well as giving approaches to interactive assembly and tolerance analysis in virtual environment, which include recognition of assembly relation based on assembly ports, partial disassembly in assembly procedure, assembly movement navigation, recording of assembly procedure and tolerance information visualization. Besides, the paper also realizes the reusing of virtual assembly procedure to support modification and refinement of components´ structure in collaborative product design.