Assembly Enhancements

Faster GCD extraction time for large assemblies

aPriori 2023 R1 SP2 extends enhancements made in aPriori 2023 R1 SP1, reducing the time required to open or re-extract GCDs for large assemblies due to faster calculation of Contact Region GCDs.

Contact Region GCDs represent areas of contact between two parts. The aPriori Assembly manufacturing process model uses them to support cycle time and cost estimates of assembly joining operations.

As a result of these performance improvements to contact region analysis, the GCD extraction time for assemblies with hundreds of components decreased significantly compared to the previous release of aPriori. The amount of improvement for any given assembly may vary, based on factors including the number of components and the geometry of the individual components.

Note that if Contact Region extraction already is disabled for your deployment via the site variable enableContactAnalysis, this fix will not provide any additional benefit.

Additional Settings for Assembly Contact Region Analysis

aPriori 2023 R1 SP2 provides two new settings to control when and how Contact Region GCDs are extracted, in order to reduce Contact Region extraction time and speed Assembly opening time.

Previously there was only one site variable which controlled whether any ContactRegions were extracted for an assembly (enableContactAnalysis - set to true by default)

Two additional site variables introduced in aPriori 2023 R1 SP2 provide a finer level of control, and can be used to limit GCD extraction times when appropriate:

• maxNumberOfPartsForContactAnalysis – (default value is 1000) – aPriori will not compute any contact regions, if the total number of parts in the assembly exceeds this threshold.

• enableLowerLevelComponentContactRegions – If set to true (the default) Contact Region GCDs will be extracted for all components in the assembly tree. If set to false, aPriori will create ContactRegion GCDs only between top-level parts and subcomponents.

For the example below, the top-level assembly is comprised of a green sub-assembly and a blue sub-assembly, each with three parts. Setting the value of enableLowerLevelComponentContactRegions to false results in two contact regions being extracted (between parts P1 and P4 and between parts P3 and P6), as this is where the two sub-assemblies are in contact. These two contact regions are highlighted yellow in the image below. Setting the value to true will result in four additional lower-level contact regions being extracted (between P1 and P2, P2 and P3, P4 and P5, and P5 & P6)

Note that, generally, the Assembly manufacturing process model assumes the CAD model hierarchy properly represents how components are organized into higher level assemblies. Setting this value to false is consistent with that assumption, as it should not be necessary to perform joining operations between lower-level components in different sub-assemblies.