CAD support for product family design using parametrics, mating relationships, and modularity

Changing markets are a reality today, and because of that, flexibility is a feature that has to be borne in mind within the design phases. To survive in today’s volatile market, companies are striving to deliver greater quality, more customization, faster response, more innovative designs and lower prices. New models need to be introduced in the market more frequently, which has given momentum for designing family of products. Product family design involves trade-off between commonality and performance, which require analysis and evaluation of performance for the entire family instead of a single product. This paper presents the concepts involved in the implementation of the product family design using CAD tools. CAD systems can provide support to develop a family of products by featuring solid representations of components and then by assembling these into the product components. This paper presents a CAD tool to improve the support for design and development of product families using parametrics, mating relationships, and modularity. The act of grouping components into modules and establishing links between them through mating relationships provide CAD systems with a useful tool within product design. The chance of creating a parameterized model is a powerful feature of CAD systems in that the designer can find out his or her expectations about the product by varying the parameters within the Product Family’s options. Generation of the CAD models of user customized products are important to increase the interactivity with user. In this paper we apply the CAD support to semi-automatically generate solid models of two families of products: office chairs and coffee makers.