CATIA is the World's Leading Solution for Product Design and Experience.

And most of the Products designed in CATIA can also be configured, to provide final customers with several variants and options for instance.

You will then find in this post a set of demonstrations (no Best Practices, only demonstrations on simple examples) on

1. first how to create (simple) configurations of product, mainly variants & options with rules.
2. how to use these configurations for design & relational design
   

This example is "based" on the Dassault Aviation Rafale french fighters, which has (I will keep it simple) 3 main variants: Rafale B, C and M, described hereunder.

You can also see in this picture and this video the DMU developed for this demonstration, with some bulkheads in the fuselage driven by a skeleton.

Configuration Management

Before going into details on the 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA side, we will start with the creation of variants and options thanks to ENOVIA Model Definition application.

The following steps are then to create Model Version, rules...

...and Product Configurations that will allow to filter the Product Structure.

Once Model Version (with its variants, options, rules and Product Configurations) has been defined, it then possible to associate it to a 150% DMU of the airplane and to specify effectivities of each instance.

That is to say to specify in which cases instances are available, or not. All these operations are performed in ENOVIA Product Structure Editor application in this video.

It is then simple to filter the Product Structure of theRafale plane using predefined Product Configurations.

Use Case 1: 1 skeleton driving 1 bulkhead used into 2 Product Configurations

All this being done, we can now jump back to our beloved CATIA applications, with a first use case in which one skeleton part is driving one (or several) bulkhead(s) used into two different Product Configurations.

1. The first step of the following video is to opened the filtered Product Structure (using one Product Configuration, the Rafale M one) into Assembly Design to performed a modification of the skeleton. And then an update of a bulkhead driven by this skeleton.
2. Going back to Product Structure Editor, I filtered Rafale Product thanks to another Product configuration,  Rafale C, which "contains" previous skeleton and bulkhead.
3. Opening these filtered data into 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA, I can check that everything is ok: skeleton and bulkhead are up to date, and links inside this last one are synchronized.

For those who know CATIA V5, event if this version was a great one for the Relational Design, this type of scenario with several configurations can, most of the time, be very difficult to be achieved.. We have then here a great 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA added value.

Use Case 2: 1 skeleton driving 2 bulkheads, each one used into 1 Product Configuration

In a second use case, I will deal with one skeleton driving by two different published geometries, each one used in one bulkhead, each one available in one specific Product Configuration.

1. here in a first step I modify a published geometry of the skeleton which drives one bulkhead available in the Rafale M.
2. and then I modify another published geometry of the same skeleton which drives another bulkhead available in the Rafale C.

Use Case 3: duplication of 1 bulkhead (driven by 1 skeleton) to create a new one in another 1 Product Configuration

I have already described in previous posts what is Relational Design and some of its added values.

In this last example, you will see how to reuse a bulkhead from one Product Configuration into another one.