Here is the second of my Abaqus/CAE Plug-Ins. Some more Plug-ins will follow in the next weeks.

Plugin “Recreate Assembly”:
 

Imported assemblies into Abaqus/CAE often lose their part-instance relationship. In this case every instance is converted to a separate part. From that, a single instance of every part is created in the assembly. That means for example, instead of having one bolt with 16 instances, we now have 16 bolt with one instance each. This structure prevents us from using the benefits of part-level partitioning and meshing.

My Plug-In tries to fix this issue by doing a kind of geometrical search. The users selects an instance in the Plug-In UI. From that it detects the corresponding part and then compares all other parts against it. If geometrically identical parts are found, it replaces all instances of those parts with instances of the initial part.

The short video below shows that on a simple example. Be aware of the color coding based on the criteria “Parts”. Every instance from a different part gets a different color. That also means, that all instances of the same part get the same color. The effect of my Plug-In will become directly visible in the colors.
 

The short video below shows an example. The files are attached.
 

Additional remarks:
 

This Plug-In is not an official Dassault Systemes/Simulia product. I’ve created it on my own and initially only for me. The UI is built with the RSG Plug-in. This brings some limitations regarding catching user errors and displaying messages.
 

You can find more Plugins for Abaqus/CAE in the wiki of this community (Link) and in the DS Knowledge Base (Link1, Link2).

Edit: You can find an updated version that also works with Python 3 in Abaqus 2024 in my Github account (Link).