by Melanie Donabauer
Abstract:
For companies there is often the need to offer several products that are similar in their core functionality but differ slightly from each other. The reason why is, that each customer may have different requirements for such products. There exists a process called clone-and-own where existing products are usually used as references to create new variants from them. The problem with that approach is, that it has to be done manually which contributes to the reason why clone-and-own is very error prone. Therefore technologies are required that simplify the process of creating a wide variety of similar products. Usually this is a topic in software engineering, but it is also of importance for mechanical engineering since it may be required to design and construct similar mechanical artefacts, e.g. variations of an existing robot with different arm lengths. There are little approaches that deal with these problems in the context of mechanical engineering. Therefore this thesis dwells on the issue whether it is possible to create several product variants from a mechanical artefact. For that purpose parsers will be implemented that take diverse files which describe parts of the mechanical product as input. These parsers will build an internal model and will write the relevant information back to a new file of the corresponding format. A crucial issue will be whether the produced output can be opened in the respective tools again and whether they may be reused for the parsers.
Reference:
Automated Generation of Product Variants in Mechanical Engineering (Melanie Donabauer), 2015.
Bibtex Entry:
@Baccthesis{Donabauer2015,
author = {Melanie Donabauer},
title = {Automated Generation of Product Variants in Mechanical Engineering},
year = {2015},
abstract = {For companies there is often the need to offer several products that
are similar in their core functionality but differ slightly from
each other. The reason why is, that each customer may have different
requirements for such products. There exists a process called clone-and-own
where existing products are usually used as references to create
new variants from them. The problem with that approach is, that it
has to be done manually which contributes to the reason why clone-and-own
is very error prone. Therefore technologies are required that simplify
the process of creating a wide variety of similar products. Usually
this is a topic in software engineering, but it is also of importance
for mechanical engineering since it may be required to design and
construct similar mechanical artefacts, e.g. variations of an existing
robot with different arm lengths. There are little approaches that
deal with these problems in the context of mechanical engineering.
Therefore this thesis dwells on the issue whether it is possible
to create several product variants from a mechanical artefact. For
that purpose parsers will be implemented that take diverse files
which describe parts of the mechanical product as input. These parsers
will build an internal model and will write the relevant information
back to a new file of the corresponding format. A crucial issue will
be whether the produced output can be opened in the respective tools
again and whether they may be reused for the parsers.},
file = {:BSc Theses\\2015 Melanie Donabauer\\MelanieDonabauer-AutomatedGenerationOfProductVariantsInMechanicalEngineering-preprint.pdf:PDF},
owner = {AK117794},
timestamp = {2015.09.21},
}