Institute of Computer-aided Product Development Systems

Application of Similarity Comparison Methods in Product Design Procedure

D. Roller , L. Zehtaban

In order to design a new product, a typical approach is to search for a similar designed product and modify an existing similar product rather than design a new product entirely from the scratch. This way; time, effort and cost can be saved and the new product can be designed efficiently re-using the information about design, modeling and manufacturing of a similar product. In contemporary situations there is usually a support for finding similar designs. Thus it would be very important to have a proper similarity comparison algorithm to apply anytime in design process.

Fig. 1: Product development procedure

There are two major difficulties in most of product design procedures based on using an existing design for developing a new product. The first challenge is to search the existing design data base and find the most similar product to the new product which will be produced. And the second is to optimize the design for the new product considering the manufacturing process as well. As shown in Fig. 1, the first difficulty plays a very important role in the whole design process and a wrong decision could completely change the final solution. So integration of similarity recognition tools to routine design procedures could be highly beneficial for the complete product development and manufacturing chain.

As the first step of this project, the advantages and disadvantages of different similarity comparison methods, like text-based comparison, topology comparison, feature-based comparison, geometry comparison and etc. wil be investigated. The next step is to implement a proper similarity recognition method which is able to detect similarities between characteristics defined by the design engineer (or the design tool) with an item listed in the products data base.