This book is intended for the user who needs to become quickly familiar with Product Functional Definition.
This overview provides the following information:
CATIA - Product Functional Definition
describes the functional systems of a product to be designed and
visualizes them in a schematic-like viewer. This application also manages
variants for the functional systems. Moreover, it enables to create links
between the functional systems and CATIA product items, thus allowing
full functional and physical definition in V5. Finally, scripts can be created
from the functional view in order to generate 3D data.
Description of the functional systems of a product
The user identifies the functional objects involved in his product (seen as
a system) and the interactions between them. The system is presented as a
graph, where the objects are displayed as nodes and the interactions as arcs.
This leads to a graphic presentation of sentences. Thus, the semantic view of
the product is defined prior to the other product design stages (preliminary
and detailed).
Decomposition of the functional definition across several documents
This approach is similar to the Product - Subproduct decomposition
(Insert New, Insert Existing, ...). The parameters of the subsystems, that can
be reused on a higher level of the system, can be published. This functionality
is useful in case of large systems.
Visualization of the functional systems in a schematic-like viewer
The schematic-like viewer has the UML (Unified Modeling Language look)
look. The user can spread graph elements to produce a better 2D layout and
allow easy reading a/o analysis of the system model.
Management of variants for the functional systems
To help the brainstorming on next generation systems and to start
alternative studies, the user can keep the old design as a basis.
Creation of links between functional systems and CATIA product
items
The user can define several associations attached to a functional
entity. An association is made of several links to PPR
(Process-Product-Resource) items of any kind: product, part, sketch, wireframe
element in a sketch, etc. This enables to regroup the links to PPR items
attached to a functional entity according to a given design stage (2D skeleton,
rough design, preliminary design, detailed design, etc). Consequently, more
flexibility and more accuracy are given to the user, who can fully define
functionally and physically a product in CATIA V5.
Management of scripts
The user can manage scripts from the functional view in order to
generate 3D data. A functional entity can contain different scripts adapted to
different design stages. This enables to break up the different design stages
in different scripts, and thus gives more flexibility to the user.
Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore, we recommend that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products. It also describes the general layout of V5 and the interoperability between workbenches.
To get the most of this guide, we suggest that you start performing the step-by-step Getting Started tutorial.
Once you have finished, you should move on to the User Tasks section.
The Workbench Description section, which describes the PFD workbench, and the Customizing section, which explains how to set up the options, will also certainly prove useful.
To perform the scenarios, you will be using sample documents
contained in either the online/pfdug/samples
folder.
For more information about this, please refer to
Accessing Sample
Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.
To learn more about the conventions used in this guide, refer to the Conventions section.