Fundamental Paradigm

Overview > Fundamental Paradigm

A fundamental difference of paradigm exists between the Electromechanical and Mechanical worlds. The obvious involves the difference between "logical/systems" and "physical/mechanics".

The less obvious but more important paradigm difference to the software and technology tool developers is a recurring and historic headache to the electromechanical design and manufacturing industries: instantiation. It is still inexplicably absent from the enterprise and pure mechanical technology tools, other than in graphical representation and analysis.

Once a mechanical design is completed, it is managed via Bills-of-Material (BOM) in various levels of "roll-up". Everything is known about a mechanical design: part number, part name, quantity, revision, purchased or fabricated, color, hardness, surface treatment, specifications ... except one of the most important characteristics: instantiation, an attribute that is critical to the electromechanical world.

The reason that instantiation is poorly managed in mechanical is the fact that a drawing or 3D data represent the "missing information" but is typically not available to data management.

Instantiation presumes several other important attributes such as topology and detail proximity, characteristics that mechanical analysis and simulation tools do use but Bills-Of-Material do not

Mechanical instantiation can be best described with a product design example. Consider a 200mm square tooling plate with four 10 mm diameter jig feet located 20mm from each edge.

CAD data contains the X, Y, Z locations as well as the i, j, and k vectors of all components, presuming that the five objects are solids. The BOM disregards physical location and object proximity simply reporting:

Detail	Quantity	Part Number	Part Name
1	1	5061772	Plate, Tooling
2	4	9227-20	Feet, Jig

Consider a similar electromechanical design of a four connector harness:

An oversimplified electromechanical "BOM" can be represented as:

Detail	Quantity	Part Number	Part Name	Related Detail	Location
1-1	1	CI-90023	Connector	2-1	10,15,20
1-2	1	CI-90023	Connector	2-2	70,15,20
1-3	1	CI-90023	Connector	2-3	10,50,20
1-4	1	CI-90023	Connector	2-4	70,50,20
2-1	35mm	PV-18	Wire, 18ga	1-1	--
2-2	35mm	PV-18	Wire, 18ga	1-2	--
2-3	35mm	PV-18	Wire, 18ga	1-3	--
2-4	35mm	PV-18	Wire, 18ga	1-4	--
2-5	100mm	PV-18	Wire, 18ga	2-1,2-2,2-3,2-4	--

To the mechanical enthusiast, this amount of collected data may appear to be both trivial but intuitively correct in that the proximity information is available as 3D.

The Warranty and Service personnel, this information is critical to understanding the effects of usage and environment on the performance of an individual detail or subassembly.

The next generation Product Data Management system will be capable of knowing and retrieving virtually every aspect of a component's composition, as reflected in the following chart:

Only after all definition, proximity, and location information is known to the components composing a product definition will the worlds of electromechanical and mechanical achieve a true level of integration.