Establishment of functional relationships between product components in assembly database

In an assembly environment, explicit interface information between the major part components is necessary to determine proper assembly plans, avoid undesirable interferences between parts, and achieve the required product function. A semantic association model (SAM^*)-based assembly database is proposed to organize this assembly-specific semantic information in a hierarchical structure in its subassembly module. A hybrid constructive solid geometry/boundary representation (as a structured face adjacency graph) is used to represent each component part of the assembly. These are stored in single part modules. The representational scheme is feature based and a functional relationship graph is developed to establish the required mating conditions between these features of different components in an assembly.