Graph machine learning for assembly modeling

Assembly modeling refers to the design engineering process of composing assemblies (e.g., machines or machine components) from a common catalog of existing parts. There is a natural correspondence of assemblies to graphs which can be exploited for services based on graph machine learning such as part recommendation, clustering/taxonomy creation, or anomaly detection. However, this domain imposes particular challenges such as the treatment of unknown or new parts, ambiguously extracted edges, incomplete information about the design sequence, interaction with design engineers as users, to name a few. Along with open research questions, we present a novel data set

A recommendation system for CAD assembly modeling based on graph neural networks

In computer-aided design (CAD), software tools support design engineers during the modeling of assemblies, i.e., products that consist of multiple components. Selecting the right components is a cumbersome task for design engineers as they have to pick from a large number of possibilities. Therefore, we propose to analyze a data set of past assemblies composed of components from the same component catalog, represented as connected, undirected graphs of components, in order to suggest the next needed component. In terms of graph machine learning, we formulate this as graph classification problem where each class corresponds to a component ID from a catalog and the models are trained to predict the next required component. In addition to pretraining of component embeddings, we recursively decompose the graphs to obtain data instances in a self-supervised fashion without imposing any node insertion order. Our results indicate that models based on graph convolution networks and graph attention networks achieve high predictive performance, reducing the cognitive load of choosing among 2,000 and 3,000 components by recommending the ten most likely components with 82-92% accuracy, depending on the chosen catalog