A General Structure Mining Method Based on Connection Feature Pairs

With the application of product digitization technology, a large number of assemblies have been accumulated in long-term mechanical design activities. These models contain rich experience and wisdom from designers and provide the basis for the reuse of model information. This paper takes the connection features of the assembly model as the object and proposes a general assembly structure mining method based on the connection feature pairs on the basis of existing research. First, the spatial information of parts in an assembly are extracted to form the connection feature pair which consist of the parts contact surfaces and connection relationship. Secondly, the graph structure is used to describe the assembly model. A method for quantitative description of assembly models based on connection feature graph was proposed. Then, quick and frequent subgraph mining is applied to obtain the general structure in the assembly model set. At last, the instance of general structure mining is revealed to indicates that the method proposed in this paper is available to support the general structure mining of assembly for design reuse.