KBDA - A knowledge based design system for assembly

This paper presents an expert design system, KBDA, for product assembly analysis and refinement. The system performs analysis for system products and provides advises for design refinement. The program is constructed by four different modules. The assembly method is determined first by the criteria of production functions. The analysis for either manual or automatic assembly is then performed to obtain the assembly efficiency. Based on the assembly efficiency and the part features, the design improvements are suggested to enhance products assembly. The bell roller assembly is presented to verify the KBDA model. Some useful design guidelines such as part number minimization and features for assembly time reduction are suggested. The improvement on the product design is found significant.