Enabling intelligent variant design using constraints

We describe a methodology to support variant design. This methodology was developed in an ESPRIT project called DEKLARE and its objective is to help companies facing the pressures of “customer driven design” with fast design cycles and geometric and non geometric constraints on the products, A typical example of this is from one of our DEKLARE project partners: Copreci (Spain). Copreci manufactures components for household appliances: for example, gas taps for companies such as Hotpoint and Thomson. For Copreci, all gas taps are similar, but any new order may trigger a new design variant. While conventional CAD support focuses on reuse of geometry, in gas tap engineering there are a large number of functional constraints on the design which need to be taken into consideration. Merely “cutting and pasting” CAD objects can introduce errors in a new design because there is no knowledge of, or support for, design constraints