Automated requirements-driven design synthesis of gearboxes with graph-based design languages using state of the art tools

In order to best match individual customer requirements in gearbox applications, customer-tailored gearboxes are a desirable solution. That leads to the demand for a truly individualized product development. In order to keep costs down despite an increasing product variability, novel digital design methods which automate the design process and avoid redundant manual work need to be developed and deployed. Graph-based design languages in UML (Unified Modeling Language) use a central data model to guarantee model consistency and to generate automatically multi-disciplinary models and simulations thereof.

The paper shows the use of graph-based design languages for automated gear synthesis and the automated three dimensional arrangement of gearset parts. The aim of this language is to generate the gearset including the gear calculation. The calculation automation is supported with the domain-specific synthesis tool GAP (‘Getriebe Auslegungs Programm’). The resulting gearset is then packaged into a given design space provided as one of the customer requirements. The package problem is the subject of several boundary conditions and for this reasons normally multiple solutions do exist. Therefore, optimization methods are used in the following to select the final three-dimensional arrangement. The current state of the gear system model also includes a fully parametric CAD housing.

The approach shown in this paper can be extended to the entire product life cycle, also including domain-specific and already established software solutions. Finally, the opportunity is present to include further product assessments like a cost calculation and a first reliability check of the system.

The authors are aware of the fact that this fully automated process is currently still restricted to a specific class of product design problems such as gears and gearbox design.