An Integrated Design and Appraisal System for Vehicle Interior Packaging

Static seating bucks have long been used as the only means to subjectively appraise the vehicle interior packages in the vehicle development process. The appraisal results have traditionally been communicated back to the requesting engineers either orally or in a written format. Any design changes have to be made separately after the appraisal is completed. Further, static seating bucks lack the flexibility to accommodate design iterations during the evolution of a vehicle program. The challenge has always been on how to build a seating buck quickly enough to support the changing needs of vehicle programs, especially in the early vehicle development phases. There is always a disconnect between what the seating buck represents and what is in the latest design (CAD), since it takes weeks or months to build a seating buck and by the time it is built the design has already been evolved. There is also no direct feedback from seating buck appraisal to the design in CAD.

A new integrated design and appraisal system composed of a computer controlled adjustable seating buck and its CAD-based virtual buck has been developed at Ford Motor Company. This new system directly connects the computer-controlled physical buck with the virtual buck for rapid vehicle package design and appraisal in the early stages of a vehicle program, long before the data is available to build a conventional seating buck. This paper describes the new system, the methods and processes used for its development.