SBIR-STTR Award

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

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II 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 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. A framework is proposed to manage the complexity of model synchronization and view-generation with the domain-unified modeling environment through the active management of constraints and goals for model population and transformation. The framework is to be validated within the context of an environment for the creation, management, and distribution of domain-unified models of packaged electronic components. The broader impact of this work accrues from the application of the domain-unified modeling methodology to packaged components for printed electronic assemblies (PCAs). The design of electronic products is realized through a combination of electronic design automation (EDA) software tools and computer-aided design (CAD) tools that support a wide variety of inter-related design and analysis disciplines spanning the electronic and mechanical domains (e.g. functional, layout, thermal, manufacturability). These tools are critically dependent on the availability of accurate computer-interpretable models of packaged electronic components. Due to the absence of accepted modeling standards, a lack of effective tools for the creation, maintenance, and distribution of component data, and a lack of interoperability across EDA and CAD tools. The proposed domain-unified modeling tools and data services will enable OEMs to more efficiently mange and distribute component information within their enterprises, OEMs and designers to leverage collective efforts in component modeling, and provide efficient mechanisms for the communication of data between component suppliers and OEMs