Keywords: quality assurance, STEP data structures, product life cycle, knowledge based engineering, FEA, workflow, PDM, web browsers, schema.

The design process for the development of any product now involves considerable amount of finite element analysis (FEA). Large FEA projects such as aircraft or automobiles involving the entire product will have thousands of separate components that are modelled and analysed individually at physically separate locations and then combined to represent the complete product for a full analysis. Configuration management and Quality Assurance (QA) of FEA projects require the development of tools using the present database and web-based technologies. The principle requirement of QA is management responsibility, quality system maintenance, checking and review, design control and process monitoring. All these data related to the FE modelling and analyses are required in the present federated working environment. Moreover ability to be able to access FEA results throughout the life cycle of a component will be useful in understanding the residual life of each component. The development of AP209 as part of the STEP format development addresses some of these issues. However, AP209 is still not widely available and in cases where FEA analysis is used for life estimation, re-design and repair, configuration management can be a vital tool.

QA and workflow monitoring during the development process of the FE models appears equally important as a large number of sub-component models are concurrently developed and this kind of monitoring clearly indicates the work status [1]. In this paper identification tags are constructed from decomposable geometric features as well as other main properties of a FE model. The methodology was developed and implemented successfully to concurrently develop and analyse the FE model of an aircraft fuselage [2]. This methodology ensures that in a concurrent modelling environment, clear identities are available for QA and workflow monitoring. It also ensures that from the integrated models, we can now choose components based on their identification tags and view and document the analysis results for use in a product life cycle environment.

The development of a feature based approach as detailed in [3] is used in this paper. Parts of this approach, which are available in different ways in many FEA pre-processors, can be exploited in a design process oriented to the product life cycle. In this paper, we describe an approach that is linked to a knowledge based engineering (KBE) tool we have developed earlier [4], where we begin any design as a conceptual product model and a particular component design is a part of the product model tree. Apart from the product design using the KBE tool which is part of the design process the approach also provides a configuration management and QA structure through the entire product life cycle. A front-end is developed using web-based tools to assimilate these data structures into the product data management system, thus ensuring that both the QA and life cycle related process could access this data.

1

H.M. Shih and M.M. Tseng, "Workflow technology-based monitoring and control for business process and project management", International Journal of Project Management, 14, 6, 373-378, 1996. doi:10.1016/0263-7863(96)00026-9

2

C.N. Satyanarayana, B.S. Madhusudan, A.V. Murthy and S. Chandra, "Finite element modelling of a pressurised commuter aircraft fuselage", MSC Users Conference, Bangalore, September, 1999.

3

P.R. Kashyap, A.L. Srikanth, B.S. Madhusudan, A.V. Murthy and S. Chandra, "Quality assurance for FE modelling: A case study of the SARAS front fuselage", PD ST 9906, NAL, February, 1999.

4

Chandra, S. and Dhayanidhi, J., "Structuring the Design Process from Phenomenological Models to FEA via Knowledge Engineering", Progress in Civil and Structural Engineering Computing, B.H.V. Topping, (Editor) Saxe-Coburg Publications, Stirling, UK, Chapter 3, 63-84, 2003. doi:10.4203/csets.10.3

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