关键词: 自顶向下, 协同, 装配设计, 智能体, 变动传播

Abstract: To ensure the consistency of the distributed assembly models during the collaborative top-down assembly design, an agent based approach was presented for addressing variation propagation which effectively updated the distributed assembly models. The assembly model changes were automatically monitored through the interaction and cooperation of the agents located at the clients and server. The changes and distributions of the related distributed assembly models were reasoned by the agent located at the server. Based on the reasoning result the distributed assembly models of the related clients and the server were updated in a command based mechanism. The approach could effectively deal with engineering constraint variations, feature variations, assembly constraint variations and hierarchical variations. The approach was implemented and verified through a variation propagation example during the collaborative top-down design of a manipulator.

Key words: top-down, collaborative, assembly design, agent, variation propagation