Case-based design for assembly

Design-for-Assembly (DFA) is a methodology for improving product designs for easier and less costly assembly operations. It is a very prevalent practice, in redesigning a product for easier assembly, to apply prior cases or episodes of redesign strategics and to adapt them for a given design domain. In order to apply such reuse of prior redesign strategies, we first introduce REV-ENGE (from REVerse ENGineering), a model of redesign process tor DFA 12 based on a problem solving paradigm called the replay and mmodify 16. In REV-ENGE, a heuristically inferred design process is replayed and modified (using a case-based approach) wherever necessary and possible, in accordance to the original design intention, for newly specified design goals. This paper focuses on application of redesign cases in the context of replay and modify paradigm of REV-ENGE. Case-based reasoning is particularly applicable, since the redesign process in REV-ENGE proceeds without a full behavioral model of the target design. This paper explores how far general design knowledge and experience can be taken to produce interesting redesigns without detailed domain models.