For manufacturing companies it is important to develop and produce products that meet requirements from customers and investors. One key factor in meeting these requirements is the efficiency of the product development process. Design automation is a powerful tool to increase efficiency in that process resulting in shortened lead-time, improved product performance, and ultimately decreased cost. Further, automation is beneficial as it increases the ability to adapt products to new product specifications, which is critical to some categories of products.
In this paper the retrieval and evaluation processes of the Case Based Reasoning (CBR) method are extended to include shape matching. This enhanced CBR method supports the reuse of existing components when introducing new variants of variant-rich products. The matching method is based on clearance analyzes and is performed during the retrieval of cases and supports the evaluation of suggestions. The method is described along with a prototype-system where the process of selecting components for roof racks for cars is targeted for automation. One specific component of the roof rack is targeted, namely a rubber pad used in the interface between the car roof and the rack.
