About Component-based Design

In civil engineering modeling, the component based design is a technique to model specific construction elements from the design intent capture to detailed design based on reusable components.

This technique relies on the building and civil types modeling and involves the continuous level of development (LOD) process with a code number evolving with the maturity of the design from 100 to 500. For more information, see http://bimforum.org/lod/.

This section discusses how component-based design works.

The technique consists in three major steps:

• Capture the primary design intent in a 3D part (a 3D shape representation or a 3D skeleton representation) through the capture component specification mechanism. The 3D part can be specialized to benefit from the object types defined. See About Skeleton Representation for more information.
• Translate the conceptual design into detailed design and fabrication design by instantiating feature-based templates associated to the component specifications.
• Apply the detailed design to a product structure and extend it by instantiating the product-based engineering templates or assemblies associated to component specifications in one shot.

Component based-design involves the progressive maturation of the design from the conceptual design to the detailed design and fabrication. The Change Level of Development mechanism plays a prominent role in the two last steps by updating the feature and PLM views of the specification features defined with help from Capture Component Specifications.

This section provides you with more information about the lifecycle management of an object type.

An orange circle is displayed next to the object type to inform you that a new revision of this object has been released:

• no user features have been created: click the arrow to update the definition of the specification features with the last revision of the object type.
• user features have been created: click the arrow and the Object Type Upgrade dialog box is displayed to ask if you want to upgrade object types. if you click Yes, user features will be upgraded:
  • for solid user features, the user features corresponding to the old revision are deleted and new user features are generated
  • for non-solid user features: when possible, the user features corresponding to the old revision are replaced by new features corresponding to the last revision. If they cannot be replaced, then old features are deleted and new ones are generated.

The Clean and Clean All context menus are available under Pattern Inputs to delete the user feature associated to the selected specification feature or delete all user features of all specification features.

This section lists the commands involved in component based-design.

The table provides the list of commands, the app where it is to be found, as well as a description.

Command Name	Description	Available in Building & Civil Assemblies?	Available in Civil Engineering 3D Design?
Define Component	Defines a product component from a 3D part or a product assembly by publishing an axis system as component origin and declaring openings and impacts. Use this command when dealing with a product-based component.	 (Component section)	No
Capture Component Specifications	Creates specification features and captures information needed to generate 3D models. The specification feature will be used by commands such as Component Placement or Change Level of Development	No	 (Civil Engineering section)
Component Placement	Enables to place components.	 (Component section)	No
Change Level of Development	Automatically instantiates and synchronizes User Defined Features using specification features as inputs. These parametric components can be developed over time to contain increasing levels of detail and complexity. At a certain point in the evolution of a project, a reference or a template can be instantiated to give more details to the project and make it PLM.	 (Component section)	No
Semantic Geometry Tagger	Publishes the semantic geometry to be used on a component as well as the missing semantic geometry with regards to the BIM specifications.	 (BIM section)	 (Civil Engineering section)
Show All Component Specifications	Shows all specification features of the active product.	 (View section)	 (View section)
Hide All Component Specifications	Hides all specification features of the active product.	 (View section)	 (View section)
Show Free Component Specifications	Shows free specification features of the active product.	 (View section)	 (View section)
Component Impacts	Creates openings and impacts from selected instantiated product components.	 (Component section)	No
Impacted By	Creates openings and impacts on one or several selected representations.	 (Component section)	No
Delete Impacts	Deletes opening and impacts(context menu).	 (context menu )	No
Product Attributes	Adds and edits attributes for each object in the project. You can assign an object type to an object.		