SBIR Phase I: Domain-Unified Modeling for Electro-Mechanical Component Libraries

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes a framework to support product development, analysis, and decision making in multi-domain engineering environments through domain-unified product models. Ad hoc and even formal (standards-based) product data models, subject to the need for multiple views and attributes to support domain-specific application requirements, suffer from data redundancy and consistency problems. These problems are exacerbated by the implicit nature of information in geometric representation schemes and the difficulty and latency of its access. The result is expensive translations, manual verification, and slow design iterations leading to lengthy and expensive product development cycles. The intellectual merit of the work lies in the ability of the developed formalism to support the simultaneous generation and maintenance of multiple views of product model data, and the enforcement of consistency between them. In this project, a novel use of proxy geometric scripts enables tracking dependencies of numeric-valued geometric attributes on implicit information in a geometric representation. The broader impact of this work accrues from the application of the domain-unified modeling methodology to packaged components for printed electronic assemblies in the aerospace and defense industry though an international standard for product data modeling (ISO 10303-210). The demanding nature of the application and long product life-cycles result in very large component libraries and models that must support design and analysis processes across multiple domains (electrical, thermal, mechanical, manufacturing, metrology, etc.). Hence, the problem of redundancy and consistency of data in components models is particularly severe. If successful, this project will result in tools that will bring increased technical capability and productivity to American industry, and will provide the scientific and engineering community valuable insight into tractability of the data consistency problems being faced in multi-domain engineering design environments.