Introduction

In today’s economy, businesses seek to develop product portfolios faster, cheaper, with fewer design iterations at higher quality. To avoid costly corrections at prototype stage, designs need to be iterated multiple times before “steel is cut” to ensure product meets customer specifications. Currently, product development processes manage conceptual design, engineering calculations, CAD, CAE and physical prototype phases linearly, with each successive phase requiring more time stretching the time to market. The core challenge is in how to meet these expectations in the shortest possible time while maintaining quality, predictability and engineering integrity. One approach is in helping engineers see far and deep into the product performance at the conceptual design phase. This ensures maximum engineering predictability and positively impacts overall timeline & design quality, while reducing iterations and costs. However, different and complex software tools make this iterative evaluation either time consuming or seriously sub-optimal. Even if done, some components of product performance remain outside the ambit of design evaluation as these tools lack seamless integration.

Constraint Driven Engineering Design Synthesis

Constraint Driven Engineering Design Synthesis (CDEDS) is a smarter product development. This methodology innovates on the traditional bottom-up product development by applying engineering constraints at the conceptual design stage whereby, shape, form, fit are a “consequence” of functional constraints and not the other way round. This integrates mathematical equations with 2D conceptual geometry creation capability resulting in a qualitatively superior solution that has two key benefits:

  1. The solution is robust as it has already taken into account all the use-case scenarios that the mechanism is meant to fulfill and which an engineer can describe as mathematical constraints..
  2. The solution is Pareto optimal since engineers can impose any rational quantitative measure from engineering, manufacturing, functional or performance as a mathematical objective constraint function that is solved simultaneously.

CEAD (Conceptual Engineering and Analysis based Design):

Keeping in mind limitations of current tools CADVision Engineers began a grounds-up approach to developing a new solution to support the Constraint Driven Engineering Design Synthesis methodology. The result was CEAD, an integrated product design environment enabling preliminary hand sketches to conceptual CAE that provides a rational design foundation for a more time-intensive CAD and CAE later in the product development cycle. It is the first level computer aided software tool that an engineer would use in creating sketches of concepts, progressing to synthesizing geometry and concluding with analyzing the integrity of design to quickly assess practicality of a design concept.  The key features that make this possible are

  1. With geometry and math concurrently described on the design canvas, CEAD enables engineers to intertwine any set of mathematically consistent engineering constraints to the design even if they belong to different domains of physics.
  2. CEAD has advanced optimization tools to perform multi-objective optimization.
  3. CEAD enables first cut analysis of forces, torque stresses, etc using vector mechanics.
  4. Simulation functionality in CEAD enables engineers to see deep into the product development cycle, be it in manufacturing or machine performance.

With these features CEAD overlaps with other engineering software tools as below:


In the design cycle, CEAD is the first bare-bones tool that an engineer would use to simulate and capture the mechanics of motion, play of forces or plot trends of parameter to iteratively arrive at an optimal design that truly reflects the integrated reality of imposed constraints.

Why Use CEAD?

  • Create quick conceptual Engineering Designs

  • Synthesis Design based on goals

  • Evaluate inter-play of design constraints in different domains from first principles

  • Share Design Ideas & alternatives in the early stages

  • Analyse Kinematics (2D)

Key Features of CEAD Engineering Design Software

  • Tools for geometric design along with constraints (geometric, dimensional and equation)

  • Area and moments optimization

  • Multi-variable Simulation of mechanisms

  • Optimization

  • Force Calculations using Vectors

  • Exporting the design to Solidworks

  • Integration with Excel for further analysis