| Abstract | The increased use of 3D CAD systems by productdevelopment organizations has resulted in large databases of
assemblies; this explosion of assembly data will continue in the
future. Currently, there are no effective content-based
techniques to search these databases. Ability to perform
content-based searches on these databases is expected to help
the designers in the following two ways. First, it can facilitate
reuse of existing assembly designs, and thereby reducing the
design time. Second, a lot of useful Design for Manufacturing
and Assembly (DFMA) knowledge is embedded in existing
assemblies. Therefore a capability to locate existing assemblies
and examine them can be used as a learning tool by the
designers to learn from the existing assembly designs and
hence transfer the best DFMA practices to new designers. This
paper describes a system for performing content-based searches
on assembly databases. We identify templates for
comprehensive search definitions and describe algorithms to
perform content-based searches for mechanical assemblies. We
also illustrate capabilities of our system through several
examples.
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