An integrated approach supporting design, simulation and production engineering of connection techniques in automotive body-in-white development

Today’s automotive industry is characterized by increasingly shorter development times. This fact takes place in almost all areas of car development. The presented work is concerned with the automated support in BIW-design (body-in-white design). Presented is a method to support the design engineers in creating and processing data within the applied computer-aided design (CAD) environment. Through the implemented algorithm, a continuous process is provided, which closes the gap
between the different design and simulation processes which are necessary for the preparation and verification of body-in-white connection technologies. Moreover, the presented method is used as a connection to computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). This linking also works in the reverse direction, so that changes in the course of simulation or manufacturing engineering can be responded in the CAD process with significantly reduced effort