RBR and fuzzy comprehensive judgment method based parts locating design automation

Parts locating design involves a lot of information, using the rule based reasoning (RBR) alone to determine the part locating is not reliable when facing with a large amount of fuzzy information. For solving the problem, this paper presents a new hybrid approach using the fuzzy comprehensive judgment method and rule based reasoning to select the locating modes and locating references automatically for 3D parts. The approach uses RBR to find all the potential candidates for locating modes, and the location references for each locating mode. The fuzzy comprehensive judgment method is provided to optimally select locating surfaces. The realization of the approach is described in detail. An example is presented to illustrate the issues and show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.