Automotive Industry CAD System Automation through Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) Case Study

The product development process in the automotive industry is constantly subject to several studies focused on trying to minimize the costs and reduce the time to product. However, it can be said that there's very little focus on the opportunity that lays in the CAD Automation possibilities through the use of a method called Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE), which consists in its core essence on the reuse of knowledge gained during previous projects, as well as a set of best design practices, applied through automation methods and artificial intelligence in the CAD models. The CAD process automation could represent a significant reduction in the project hours in the automotive product development, mainly because the processes related to it are well defined and structured. Besides that, new automotive products are usually predictable and systemic, allowing room for an efficient CAD automation. This paper's objective is to revise the existing literature about Knowledge Based Engineering applied to the CAD system CATIA V5 in order to define what would be the state-of-the-art of this field, and then correlate it with what's existing and used today in two large automotive industries in the preliminary, conceptual and detailed project phases of their development process through two case studies.