As explained in my two previous posts on the Beauty and the Power of this approach, Relational Design is the capability, for several users working with CATIA 3DEXPERIENCE, to concurrently design complex parts, in context of configured products and taking into account relationship between these parts.

Nowadays, as products continue to increase in complexity, performance and quality targets are becoming more demanding. CATIA answers that challenge, enabling the rapid development of high-quality mechanical products.

Relational Design is fully in line with this logic thanks to it's intelligence allowing for instance

• Easy reuse of existing design, to speed up early development phase
• Management of different design studies, to ease innovation management
• Lifecycle Integration, to allow usage of relation design in all the development phases of a product

Easy reuse of existing design - Engineering Templates

Part and products created using the relational design approach can be easily reused thanks to Engineering Templates.

All the links imported in a Part can be used as inputs of an Engineering Template...

... allowing then the creation of new references with the "same specifications", but independent of the initial Part.

That's an easy and quick way to create "similar" parts, linked to one skeleton.

Management of different design studies - Publications

The use of Publications makes it possible to easily substitute one linked Part for another, provided they have the same "interfaces" or publications.

Furthermore, because in this case the substitution depends only on the publications and not on the geometry and parameters, it is possible then to make non-isomorphic substitutions, whether it be for geometry or product structure. Specifically, this makes it possible to substitute a Product in the place of a Part as long as the Product has exactly the same set of publications as the original Part

Lifecycle Integration

Thanks to the tight integration between CATIA and ENOVIA in our 3DEPERIENCE platform, all data created thanks to the relational design approach can easily, and on demand, take into account the availability of new revisions of driving parts/skeletons.

Let's here have a look at a this aerospace scenario, described in this picture

Going into some more detailed illustration of each steps of this scenario:

• First, the Aircraft Architect modifies his Aircraft Skeleton and creates a new revision during the save operation.

• As soon as this new Aircraft Skeleton revision is available, the Wing Architect can (on demand) checks the links and reroute them, when he needs to, to the latest revision of pointed reference.

• And finally, the Mechanical Engineer is able to perform the same kind of operations, after creating his design session to update all his parts.

It's then possible, if needed, to use relational design all along the development phase of a product.