A Virtual Environment for Legacy Mechanical Systems Engineering

Legacy systems engineering (LSE), the design of replacement parts and assemblies for sustaining and enabling modernization of legacy mechanical systems, is increasingly becoming essential due to excessive costs of replacing entire systems. LSE scenarios presume availability of multiple, possibly incomplete or inconsistent, sources of information, lack of digital descriptions of the parts, need for modern CAD models that can drive modern CAM processes, and hard time constraints. Previous approaches to designing replacement parts have not effectively addressed such diverse scenarios, and hence present challenges in trying to adapt them to the LSE problem. The proposed Multiple Engineering Resources aGent Environment (MERGE) system enables a new interactive approach toward LSE by providing a unified environment for simultaneously comparing, inspecting, manipulating and modifying multiple heterogeneous resources in order to obtain accurate feature-based CAD models of mechanical parts and assemblies. By enabling intuitive interaction and coherent visualization of information, the MERGE system enables quick identification and resolution of inconsistencies among available resources, thus making the LSE process more effective. The MERGE system also aims at simplifying the LSE process by integrating various computational agents with available resources to assist the engineer in processing information and in synthesizing the desired CAD models. The MERGE system is being implemented in the context of a feature-based geometric modeling system. A framework for effective assembly modeling and analysis has also been integrated with the modeling system. The LSE capabilities of the system are demonstrated using a rocker mount part and a FormulaSAE engine mount assembly as examples.