Automated Production of Engineering Models

This example demonstrates the research I have undertaken into automating the model creation process for engineering process models.

This example is of manufacturing a cube, where the cost of manufacture depends mainly on the size of the cube, its wall thickness, what material is used, and what process is used. This is a simple example, a real world example involving hand layup of a spar (wing component) proved to be too complicated for ease of demonstration explanation, especially over the web.

An ontology (held in Protege http://protege.stanford.edu/) is used to represent the common information needed for all cube models, (and other models) produced. The ontology is broken down into sub ontologies for parts, materials, processes, consumables, resources, and tooling. These are colour coded in the visualisation/interactive model to ease understanding.

Code written for this research is used to recursively read the Protege tree (via nested SQL calls), and reproduce the tree in the modelling system (Vanguard System http://www.vanguardsw.com/products/vanguard-system/). The modelling system enables calculations, and extra code written for this research also allows choices to be made by the user/modeller.

This simple example enables the user/modeller to make choices of the material, process, consumables, resources, and tooling to be used, for the manufacture of this cube. In this example choices were made for material - Aluminium, and process - Rivetting.

Cube Model

This model is then output to an online representation (this works in Internet Explorer only, a version for Mozilla Firefox is also in progress). The IE version requires the Adobe SVG player, currently downloadable, and free).

The online SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) representation provides an interactive CAD type representation of the component, that can be manipulated, to change size and wall thickness. The wall thickness is indicated by the inner dotted cube. As the size or wall thickness of the cube is altered, immediate feedback is provided. Alterations can be made with the up/down buttons. Also if these values, or the Aluminium cost per metre cubed are changed, the calculated parameter and cost values change automatically, in response.

The SVG representation shown below can be found at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/SVGCubeExample/CubePartDefinitionwithCosts.htm.

Cube Model - Translated to SVG

http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/SVGCubeExample/CubePartDefinitionwithCosts.htm.

It is also possible to zoom in and out of the diagram, and move it around the screen.

As well as engineering models, I have experimented with economics models, and with translating either type of model to Java, and Java applets. Below is a screenshot of a simple economic model translated and visualised as an interactive Java applet.

Consumption Function translation from modelling system into Java

The models created as part of this research are available at - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/EconomicModels/ModelsVisualised.htm.