Reuse-oriented common structure discovery in assembly models

Discovering the common structures in assembly models provides designers with the commonalities that carry significant design knowledge across multiple products, which helps to improve design efficiency and accelerate the design process. In this paper, a discovery method has been developed to obtain the common structure in assembly models. First, this work proposes a graph descriptor that captures both the geometrical and topological information of the assembly model, in which shape vectors and link vectors quantitatively describe the part models and mating relationships, respectively. Then, a clustering step is introduced into the discovery, which clusters the similar parts by comparing the similarities between them. In addition, some rules are also provided to filter the frequent subgraphs in order to obtain the expected results. Compared with the existing method, the proposed approach could overcome the disadvantages by providing an independent description of the part model and taking into consideration the similar parts in assemblies, which leads to a more reasonable result. Finally, some experiments have been carried out and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.