DOU Zhen-peng, YU Su-yang, WANG Jun-yi, DUAN Xun, LIU Jia-xin
Design for Assembly (DFA) is an important approach for improving manufacturability and reducing assembly costs during the early design stage of mechanical products. However, existing DFA evaluation methods mainly rely on manual experience and rule-based inspection, making it difficult to establish cross-domain associations among geometric design information, assembly process knowledge, and manufacturing resource capabilities. Consequently, assembly constraint conflicts cannot be effectively identified and traced at the early design stage. To address the aforementioned issues, this study proposes a knowledge-based reasoning and design optimization method for mechanical-product DFA under assembly constraints. Firstly, an automatic part DFA feature extraction method based on computational geometry is developed. By analyzing the B-Rep geometric topology information of STEP models, structured design features including dimensional parameters, physical properties, symmetry, and stability are extracted automatically, enabling the transformation from three-dimensional models into DFA evaluation data. Secondly, a ternary collaborative ontology model of “part-process-equipment” is established. Through knowledge graph representation, semantic associations among design attributes, assembly processes, and manufacturing resources are constructed, and dynamic mapping of manufacturing resource parameters is achieved. Furthermore, a hybrid reasoning mechanism integrating OWL-based description logic reasoning and Python-based rule reasoning is developed. Combined with a hierarchical 931 scoring evaluation system, the proposed method realizes assembly constraint conflict identification, cause tracing, constraint severity evaluation, and design optimization feedback. A butterfly valve assembly containing 58 components is selected as the experimental case. Two typical constraint problems, including manufacturing equipment capability mismatch and structural design constraints, are analyzed to validate the proposed method. In addition, modular ablation experiments are conducted to investigate the impacts of geometric feature extraction, knowledge modeling, and hybrid reasoning mechanisms on the performance of the method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively support assembly constraint diagnosis during the early design stage of mechanical products, achieving design problem identification, conflict cause tracing, and optimization decision support. The proposed method provides an effective approach for manufacturing-oriented collaborative design optimization.