Module-based similarity measurement for commercial aircraft tooling design

Similarity measurement (SM) between pairs of features plays an essential role in the tooling retrieval. However, the number of tooling is usually large and difficult to retrieve. What’s more, the most similar tooling model is not always optimal in the case-based reasoning (CBR). To refine this situation, we propose a novel module-based similarity measurement method. Through dividing each tooling model into different modules, a new similarity is obtained by integrating all the most similar modules (MSMs) from existing tooling models. As a result, the new similarity is superior or at least equal to the result which is derived from previous methods. With the proposed method in this paper, feature similarities of modules between a new tooling ontology and each similar tooling ontology are calculated by fuzzy similarity measurement, and the MSMs are restructured to form a new tooling model after conflict resolution. A case study on forming mould is provided to illustrate the applications and prove the higher similarity by comparing with CBR. The proposed method has been adopted in an aircraft manufacturing company.