Populating Product Data for Engineering Analysis With Applications to Printed Wiring Assemblies

The engineering data for products such as Printed Wiring Assemblies (PWAs) is a complex aggregation of heterogeneous information generated by a variety of design tools. At certain stages of the product development cycle this information is used to perform engineering analyses in order to validate the design against several criteria. This paper addresses the problem of populating product data from several heterogeneous sources in order to support the informational needs of given engineering analyses. This is usually a tedious and error-prone process, which involves accessing the data — often manually — from different repositories. stored in different formats and in different locations. After the data is retrieved, it must be integrated in a way that is meaningful to the analysis models employed. This integration is unique in that much of the data representing the design of the complete product is not used at all in the analysis, while the data that is used has to undergo significant transformation and/or idealization before being fed into the analysis models. This work proposes an object-oriented architecture to automate the data retrieval and population process. It generates a semantically meaningful set of data from which the analysis applications can extract the information they need more easily. The emerging Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) provides the neutral mechanisms needed by this architecture for describing and exchanging product data. The design and analysis of Printed Wiring Assemblies was chosen to test the concepts developed in this work. In this example, the goal is to assemble PWA product data created by several E/MCAD tools into a single integrated schema that supports the informational needs of specific thermomechanical analyses.