Contract-based product-assembly co-design

During the product design, special attention is required to ensure that the product can be assembled later on at the manufacturing floor. Front-loading the assembly or production knowledge is advantageous for the efficiency of the product design process as it limits the costly design iterations. However, this front-loading results in a big design-space, requiring computational-intensive exploration mechanisms to find an optimal design. We propose a two-stage exploration and optimization method. Within first stage, both product and assembly knowledge, captured in an ontology and their trade-offs, captured in design contracts, are used to preliminary prune the design-space. Within second stage, we explore the reduced design-space to find optimal design.