Why use RuleCHECK?
RuleCHECK can be used to offer advice and enforce design rules as appropriate for your organization. It can also be used to document a design process.
As a design advisor, RuleCHECK offers immediate access to a company’s design knowledge. Often this information is stored in design manuals, industry design codes, and in the minds of senior designers. Engineers must know when and where to search for this information. Today, products are becoming more complex, design time is reduced, and there is considerable turnover and reorganization of engineering staff. Therefore, immediate access to correct and up-to-date engineering knowledge is now becoming critical to the success of many projects.
RuleCHECK enables organization to capture these rules in form of simple design rules files and make these rules available in a proactive fashion to their Creo users directly inside the Creo Parametric design environment.
When creating a design advisor and automation tool for Creo Parametric, the most critical step is for the organization to define the equations, rules, and design steps for various types of models.
Organization should hence classify the models into appropriate types and then define the appropriate rule sets to be used for that type of model. Some of the types of rules, organizations may decide to enforce are:
• Engineering rules
These rules can include required part thickness, clearances, draft angles, or materials. These rules capture a company's knowledge base on how to design high quality parts that are easy to manufacture. They can be used to offer design advice to new engineers.
• Design process steps
The effectiveness of Creo Parametric is dependent on how it is used. For example, some assemblies are best designed top-down while others are best designed bottom-up. Often, once a type of assembly is built a number of times, the most efficient methodology becomes evident. It should be documented for all users.
• Required deliverables
In order to support downstream applications such as analysis, manufacturing, marketing, and ERP, Creo Parametric users must define or create specific parameters, simplified representations, drawings, and neutral files.
• Creo Parametric best practices
Creo Parametric contains many advanced features that allow the efficient modeling of complex products. Unfortunately, many users are not well trained in functions such as user-defined features (UDFs), simplified representations, interchange, reroute, and how to properly use master models. Specific functions can be recommended for use on different types of models.
Once the rules are defined in the format specified for RuleCHECK, you can access this knowledge base with the Creo session for the type of model you are working on.