A part affordance-based approach for detailed design process planning in collaborative environment

Detailed design process planning refers to determining the sequence of assigning values to design parameters of a product. A reasonable approach for planning a detailed design process can not only shorten development time but also reduce design iterations. Therefore, this article proposes a formal approach for detailed design process planning in a collaborative environment. It first introduces the concept of part affordance, which can be used to derive the dependency knowledge among design parameters. Then a part affordance-based approach is proposed, which can employ the dependency knowledge to generate a part affordance matrix and a part affordance constraint matrix, to help designers plan the detailed design process in a collaborative environment. The proposed approach is implemented with a detailed design process planning system. Finally, the detailed design of a two-stage gear box is used as an example to demonstrate the proposed research.