AbstractEven if during the Product Design Process, assembly models are described in terms of their constitutive components and associated relationships, only the position of each component is often stored within the Digital Mock-Up. Thus, the mating information are lost. However, these relationships are crucial for many applications, such as retrieval, assembly planning and finite element simulations. In this paper, we propose a method for the detection and use of the mating relationships for assembly model retrieval. The proposed approach detects and analyses the interferences between parts to compute their degree of freedom and kinematic pairs. To support the retrieval of assembly models, the extracted information are formalized and capitalized in a newly proposed hierarchical assembly model descriptor. Results of the application of the method are also provided to show the system capabilities. Moreover, considering that a same joint can be defined in multiple ways, this work provides also a method for retrieving assemblies in a dataset according to the part relationships and their class of equivalence

Giannini, Franca

Lupinetti, Katia

Monti, Marina

Pernot, Jean-Philippe

Procedia CIRP

Even if during the Product Design Process, assembly models are described in terms of their constitutive components and associated relationships, only the position of each component is often stored within the Digital Mock-Up. Thus, the mating information are lost. However, these relationships are crucial for many applications, such as retrieval, assembly planning and finite element simulations. In this paper, we propose a method for the detection and use of the mating relationships for assembly model retrieval. The proposed approach detects and analyses the interferences between parts to compute their degree of freedom and kinematic pairs. To support the retrieval of assembly models, the extracted information are formalized and capitalized in a newly proposed hierarchical assembly model descriptor. Results of the application of the method are also provided to show the system capabilities. Moreover, considering that a same joint can be defined in multiple ways, this work provides also a method for retrieving assemblies in a dataset according to the part relationships and their class of equivalence

LUPINETTI, Katia

GIANNINI, Franca

MONTI, Marina

PERNOT, Jean-Philippe

SAM : Science Arts et Métiers

Science Arts & Métiers (SAM)is an open access repository that collects the work of Arts et Métiers Institute ofTechnology researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible.This is an author-deposited version published in: https://sam.ensam.euHandle ID: .http://hdl.handle.net/10985/11403To cite this version :Katia LUPINETTI, Franca GIANNINI, Marina MONTI, Jean-Philippe PERNOT - Automaticextraction of assembly component relationships for assembly model retrieval - Procedia CIRP -Vol. 50, p.472-477 - 2016Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the repositoryAdministrator : archiveouverte@ensam.euIn this context, starting from assemblies stored in STEP format without information on kinematic relationships and constraints, this paper addresses the way the assembly component relationships can be extracted to better support the assembly retrieval. The idea is to exploit interface relationships through a dedicated geometric reasoning. In particular, we propose a framework for the global/partial retrieval of assembly models according to different user requirements at different levels of details.  The extracted data are then encoded in a multi-level assembly descriptor called Enriched Assembly Model (EAM) that is organized in four main levels: statistics, structure, interface and shape. This paper focuses on the interface layer, in particular on the automatic computation of different types of relationships that exist between assembly components. The interface layer represents the motions of a part with respect to another one. It encodes knowledge starting from part contacts and then rising to equivalent joint using four levels namely the contact, joint, synthesis and mechanism levels. The lowest level encodes all the faces involved in the contact between two parts and their corresponding degree of freedom (DOF). Here, contacts can be considered as constraints that limit the DOF according the involved geometric entities, i.e. points, curves or surfaces. The joint level, i.e. the second one, characterizes the resulting movement between two parts considering all their contacts. Then, the synthesis level groups support parts. In this layer, the collection of parts that form bearings, couplings, shaft or pattern of screws are considered as a unique mechanism for allowing a precise movement. The highest level corresponds to the assembly mechanism, i.e. the DOF of a part considering all the linked parts in the assembly. In this paper, the two lowest levels are described: contact and joint. Once the information extracted and stored within the so-called EAM, the assembly model retrieval can start. The use of a multi-level descriptor advantageously enables the detection of similarities according to various aspects. For instance, Fig. 1 shows two translation joints (i.e. same functionality) defined in two different ways involving different surfaces in contact. The two models are different both at the shape and at the contact levels but similar at the kinematic one. The proposed multi-level descriptor allows to capture and distinguish these configurations and can be very helpful when considering the retrieval of similar assembly models with respect to specific criteria (e.g. type of surfaces in contact).  (a)  (b)  The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the works related to the characterization and extraction of assembly relationships with a particular focus on those techniques designed for assembly retrieval purposes. In section 3, the proposed Enriched Assembly Model (EAM) descriptor is introduced, while in section 4 the technical background and the reasoning techniques to extract the assembly relationships are introduced. Some results are presented in section 5 and section 6 ends the paper providing conclusions and highlighting future works. 2. Related workSeveral works exist for the extraction of assembly contactsin different application domains. In the assembly retrieval field, Chen et al. [5] used Degree Of Freedom (DOF), kinematic pair and geometric mating to enrich their assembly descriptor. However, they are able to extract all this information for some kinematic-pairs while other complicated kinematic-pairs have to be labeled manually. Yang et al. [1] proposed a simulation system for assembly process based on the constraint recognitions, confirmations and navigation. Constraint detection is handled in the recognition phase, while the other phases compute some transformation matrices to move the assembly components in virtual systems. The recognition phase detects six types of constraints considering geometric information of the involved elements and it is based on the equivalence between them and the DOF. However it requires user intervention to track the position and the orientation of the components. An automatic method to extract kinematic information from assembly models is developed by Park and Oh [6]. They assert that most of the assembly geometric models have just revolute and prismatic joints. Their procedure is divided in three main steps. First, it identifies the regions of contact using the collision detection of boxes and parallel computation to improve the speed of calculation. Focusing on revolute joints, the second step aims to identify the contact surface of the cylinder shape and the creation of the center axis. Last step decides the type of joint using collision detection. Even though their approach identifies joints automatically, the proposed scenario it too restricted. Swain et al. [7] have defined an extended liaison to integrate the information between the product model and the assembly process. This structure is able to identify the assembly process of riveting, welding, scree fastening, bolt fastening and gluing. The proposed procedure is able to extract the liaison details automatically from assembly models, but its main limit is the complexity of the algorithm. For finite element analysis, Shahwan et al. [4] described a qualitative reasoning process to detect component interfaces from assembly models. Their method is based on the definition of conventional and functional interfaces. Unfortunately, the geometric information intrinsically contained and available in the assembly model are not sufficient for the reasoning process and additional data formalized in other structures as ad-hoc ontologies are required. Fig. 1. (a) Translation by cylindrical faces; (b) Translation by planar face Kim et al. [8] presented ontology based reasoning techniques for representing and differentiating assembly joints that are similar from geometric and topological point of view. They gave definitions and theorems for characterizing assembly joints in mereotopological representation (a formal ontology that combines mereological and topological concepts) requiring various data as fastener attribute, screw/nut head and body; but it is not mentioned how this information are obtained from the assembly model.  3. Enriched assembly modelWhen looking for an existing assembly in a database, anddepending on the objectives of the retrieval, a designer may be interested in different assembly characteristics. Thus, to support assembly retrieval with different search keys at different LOD, we define a multi-level assembly descriptor, the so-called Enriched Assembly Model (EAM). The EAM has four information layers: statistics, structure, interface and shape (Fig. 2). The statistics layer contains values that roughly characterize and discern assembly models. Number of sub-assemblies, number of principal parts, number of fasteners, number of thin parts and number of patterns of a specific type (e.g. linear, rotational or reflective patterns) are attributes associated to the entire assembly as well as to each sub-assembly. On the other hand, for matching purpose, the parts in the assembly can be filtered according to the percentage of a specific type of surface or the number of maximal faces of a specific type of surface. Then, the number of a specific joint type or the number of elements in contact for a specific contact type is considered to differentiate the type of joint present in an assembly model. The structural layer encodes the hierarchical assembly structure as specified at the design stage. In this organization, the structure is represented as a tree where the root corresponds to the entire assembly model, the intermediate nodes are associated with the sub-assemblies and the leaves characterize the parts. Attributes to specify parts arrangement (regular patterns of repeated parts) are attached to the entire assembly and its sub-assemblies [9]. The interface layer is the main focus of this paper and it specifies the relationships among the parts in the assembly. It is divided in four levels. The lowest level, i.e. the contacts level, encodes all the faces involved in the contact between two parts and the degree of freedom between those faces. Joint level describes the motion(s) resulting from several contacts between two parts, while synthesis level gathers together collection of parts that belong to the same functionality group. The highest level, i.e. the mechanism level, characterizes the overall motion of a part when considering all the associated joints.   The shape layer categorizes the shape of an assembly and its constitutive parts using several dedicated descriptors. Using several shape descriptors helps answering different assembly retrieval scenario, which can consider different shape characteristics. A complete EAM, i.e. with the four layers, is computed only for the models stored in the databases on which the search has to be performed. However, for what concerns the query, only those layers involved in the retrieval are computed and exploited, thus reducing the complexity of the system.  4. Interface layerThe interface layer aims at describing the relationshipsbetween two parts of an assembly model. Starting from the contacts involved between parts and then reasoning on the relative DOF, the relative motion of a part with respect to another one can be characterized. To formalize this knowledge, four levels are defined: contact, joint, synthesis and mechanism levels. The contacts level encodes all the faces involved in the contact between two parts and the degree of freedom between those faces. Joint level describes the motion(s) resulting from several contacts between two parts. Since the motion of a component in the assembly might be realized through different technologies (e.g. bearings, coupling and drive shaft), an additional level is introduced, the synthesis one. In this level, the parts which belong to the same equipment are grouped together thus creating a higher level of details. A further level is defined, the mechanism level, to define the overall motion of a part respect to the entire model. Fig. 3 shows an example of the structure of the interface layer. An assembly model is illustrated in Fig. 3(a) while Fig. 3(b) illustrates the four levels of the interface layer. The first row of Fig. 3(b) depicts the contacts through a graph structure, where the nodes identify the parts and the arcs represent the type of contacts. The portions of contacts, highlighted in red on Fig. 3(a), are formed by two planar and one cylindrical face, while the other junctions in the assembly involve only a cylindrical contact. For this reason, the graph representing the contact level has several arcs between some pairs of nodes. The second row of Fig. 3(b) corresponds to the joint level and represents the equivalent motion between two parts, thus the arc between nodes B and C supports an attribute value that indicates the rotation between the two corresponding parts of the assembly. The bar C and D are secondary parts and are inserted in the model to limit the final overall motion of B with respect to E, thus in the graph in the Fig. 2. Enriched assembly model layer problem, solving it by the exploitation of a probabilistic technique matching [12]. Some results are illustrated in Fig. 5. The first model used as query for the retrieval is a landing gear and the query requests models similar at the joint level. While the second model is a flange and, in this case, the requests is for models similar at the contact level. The retrieved models are very similar at local level, while the global similarity is represented by a rough measure. Two models are locally similar if a portion of the query model is present in the compared model. In both the examples, the last retrieved models are indeed locally similar. The structure of the hydraulic cylinder (last retrieved model for the first example) has the same movement (rotations) of the tires in the query, while the radial pistons (last retrieved model for the second example) have the same contacts given by the patterns of screws and bolts as in the flange model. The rate for the ranking is the ratio between the number of matched parts and the number of parts in the query models. This value is not accurate – because it considers only a parameter – but it is an index of the global percentage of the query in the retrieved models. With this meaning, some retrieved landing gears have a low global measure, but it is due to some additional components for which the models diverge. In this sense, the models are rather different at the joint level but should be more similar at a higher level of detail. Fig. 5. Similar models at the joint level and at contact level 6. Conclusion and future worksThe information concerning the relationships between thecomponents of an assembly model are crucial in several domains. However, for different reasons, those information are not always available. Tools for their automatic computation are important but it is not an easy task and some existing tools often require major user interactions. .  Starting from the basic contacts between two parts, we define a first class of equivalence able to describe the motion between the involved parts. The simple results of the landing gears show the importance of additional levels for the equivalence. In that frame, other landing gears have the same final motion but involving additional components, thus the global measure is low (in some cases it is less then 0.50). To retrieve them with a higher score, fasteners and auxiliary parts should be neglected considering only the final motion between the main parts. This objective is addressed by the other levels of equivalence, the synthesis and the mechanism ones which have not been detailed in this paper. In this way, the landing gears designed with different components will be retrieved with a higher measure at the mechanism level and lower measure at the joint level. Ongoing activities aim to improve the rules for the computation of the DOF of the contacts and for the identification of their equivalence concerning also the aspect ratio of the contact portions. For instance, a cylindrical contact with L >> r (where L and r are the cylinder length and radius respectively) could rotate along its axis, but it allows small rotations along other directions also. Another upgrading concerns the ability of recognizing if the kinematic system defined by two parts is isostatic or hyper-static. This kind of information is useful in simulation systems. References [1] Yang RD, Fan  XM, Wu DL, Yan  JQ. Virtual assembly technologies based on constraint and DOF analysis. Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing,  2007; 23 (4): 447-456.  [2] Jourdes F, Bonneau GP, Hahmann S, Léon JC, Faure F. Computation of components’ interfaces in highly complex assemblies. Computer-Aided Design, 2014; 46:170-178. [3] Wang Y,  Liu JH., Li LS. Assembly sequences merging based on assembly unit partitioning. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology 2009; 45 (7-8): 808-820. [4] Shahwan H, Léon JC, Foucault G, Trlin M, Palombi O. Qualitative behavioral reasoning from components’ interfaces to components’ functions for DMU adaption to FE analyses. Computer-Aided Design, 2013; 45 (2): 383-394. [5] Chen X, Gao S, Guo S, Bai J. A flexible assembly retrieval approach for model reuse. Computer-Aided Design, 2012; 44 (6): 554-574.  [6] Park SC., Oh JW. Kinetic Model Extraction from a Geometric Model. Computer-Aided Design and Applications 2015;  12(3): 338-343. [7] Swain AK, Sen D, Gurumoorthy B. Extended liaison as an interface between product and process model in assembly. Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 30 (5), October 2014, Pages 527-545.  [8] Kim KY, Yang H, Kim DW. Mereotopological assembly joint information representation for collaborative product design. Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 2008; 24 (6): 744-754. [9] Lupinetti K, Chang L,  Giannini F,  Monti M, Pernot J P. Regular patterns of repeated elements in CAD assembly models retrieval. Computer-Aided Design and Applications, 2016 ed. Taylor & Francis, to appear. [10] Turner  JU, Subramaniam S, Gupta S. Constraint representation and reduction in assembly modeling and analysis. Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions 1992;  8 (6): 741-750.  [11] Pommier S,  Berthaud Y. Mécanique générale. Dunod, 2010. ISBN 978-2-10-051356-7. [12] Bomze IM, Budinich M, Pelillo M, Rossi C, Annealed replication: a new heuristic for the maximum clique problem. Discrete Applied Mathematics, 2002; 121 (1–3): 27-49.  

Automatic extraction of assembly component relationships for assembly model retrieval

International audienceEven if during the Product Design Process, assembly models are described in terms of their constitutive components and associated relationships, only the position of each component is often stored within the Digital Mock-Up. Thus, the mating information are lost. However, these relationships are crucial for many applications, such as retrieval, assembly planning and finite element simulations. In this paper, we propose a method for the detection and use of the mating relationships for assembly model retrieval. The proposed approach detects and analyses the interferences between parts to compute their degree of freedom and kinematic pairs. To support the retrieval of assembly models, the extracted information are formalized and capitalized in a newly proposed hierarchical assembly model descriptor. Results of the application of the method are also provided to show the system capabilities. Moreover, considering that a same joint can be defined in multiple ways, this work provides also a method for retrieving assemblies in a dataset according to the part relationships and their class of equivalence

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Automatic Extraction of Assembly Component Relationships for Assembly Model Retrieval 

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Automatic Extraction of Assembly Component Relationships for Assembly Model Retrieval

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