Digital Fitting Instructions For Further Usage in Product-Lifecycle

In the product development process, many design solutions developed in CAD are accompanied by fitting instructions. These documents containing information for subsequent processes in the product life cycle are created in CAD but saved to PDF format for further usage. Information contained can then only be transferred manually to downstream systems to make them usable for subsequent processes and validation technologies. In order to address the disadvantage of a manual information transfer, these fitting instructions have to be digitized. According to this, the goal is to generate and store the information of the fitting instructions in a machine-readable format. This new way of entering information must be designed in a user-friendly way and, above all, must meet a certain level of expectation conformity. The fitting instructions must be available in a standardized language and the valid language model has to support all required descriptions to create consistent fitting instructions. To generate a language model the method of qualitative analysis was performed with existing fitting instructions. This allows the extraction of all necessary categories for a formal language model. Especially the operations have to be analysed regarding to their simulation effects. The method of User Centred Design was applied to develop a system for the controlled creation of fitting instructions. Therefore a usage context analysis and a user study (using a mock-up) have been conducted. The result is an assistance system for the creation of digital fitting instructions. It allows formulate the fitting instructions in natural language. Furthermore, it is possible to create the instructions using a modular system (drag & drop). On the one hand, natural language sentences can be used in the assembly instructions later. On the other hand, semantic meanings are assigned to the sentence elements, which opens up the possibility of an automated interpretation performed by other software tools (e.g. simulation software). The authors also give an outlook regarding to its automated simulation to ensure collision-free fitting paths and ergonomic aspects.