PEDAL: A Knowledge-Based Design Assistant for Automotive PEDAL Packaging

Abstract

Abstract Pedal packaging is a complex and tedious design process involving trade-offs among many related activities, including driver placement and engine compartment layout. Pedal layout design requires checks of candidate designs against large libraries of standards. Designers of pedal assemblies must carefully follow these regulations and standards, and manually come up with the pedal layout design. Differences in interpretation of the regulations result in inconsistent designs. A knowledge-based design assistant, named PEDAL, has been designed and developed to help automotive package designers overcome these problems. This paper reviews the needs of the pedal package designer in the framework of the abilities of knowledge-based engineering. PEDAL’s prototype implementation and its combined knowledge base of design standards are described.