Método de reutilização de conhecimento para geração automática de tolerâncias em projeto de produto mecânico

Abstract

The Product Development Process (PDP) is composed by several engineering activities, such as geometric modeling, computational simulation, prototyping, materials selection and suppliers developing. Some of those activities may be repetitive and time consuming, affecting productivity in industries increasingly pressured by a strong competition environment for the consumer market. One way to reduce time and cost of PDP is by introducing techniques that increase the automation level of such activities, through knowledge reutilization acquired on past projects, on current tasks. The present research develops a method for increasing the knowledge reuse with automatic generation of geometric and dimensional tolerances in mechanical product design, through a Case Based Reasoning (CBR) model based computational tool. The methodology applied is based in the Design Science Research (DSR) and is divided by 6 phases: (1) Problem identification; (2) Solution objectives definition; (3) Method development; (4) Method testing; (5) Solution evaluation; and (6) Research documenting. The developed method was demonstrated and evaluated in the context of a multinational appliance industry, and is capable of automatically indicating types and values of dimensional and geometrical tolerances, fulfilling a relevant gap identified in the tolerancing automation literature. The method is also able to decrease the tolerancing activity execution time in cases of incremental design, meeting criteria of usability, accuracy, reality fidelity, and others aspects detailed in the research.