eleed, Iss. 8 - Motion systems are important parts of technical products. Those are mostly composed of mechanisms and gears. Today mechanism and gear technology is essential for the whole industry and it will become even more important due to the introduction of new technologies and respective new fields of applications.

In today’s information society large collections of data arise by the digitization of various content sources. For example, the DMG-Lib, a digital library to collect, preserve and present the knowledge of mechanism and gear science, contains a wide range of digitized information resources in very heterogeneous media types. A main issue of all these collections is to make their contents available for new users in an adequate way. In case of DMG-Lib, the resources are enriched with various additional information like animations and simulations. Combined with innovative multimedia applications and a semantic information retrieval environment, the DMG-Lib provides an efficient access to this knowledge space of mechanism and gear science, for both experts and laymen.

End of 2010 the EU started the European project thinkMOTION, whose main goal is the Internet-based providing of information on motion systems for a wide range of users. The content to be collected within the project ranges from historical resources to the latest research results. In doing so, various information sources, such as books, patents, articles, physical models, etc., are digitized, processed and published on the Internet in form of text documents, images, interactive animations, videos, and formalized descriptions of design solutions. From a technical point of view the work in the thinkMOTION project is based on the results of the now established Digital Mechanism and Gear Library (www.dmg lib.org). The proven DMG-Lib workflow and the proven DMG-Lib tools were adapted to the requirements of a distributed working on European level. The resulting content of thinkMOTION are collected on the DMG-Lib platform and presented in different ways. It is important that the DMG-Lib content will be accessible through the Europeana portal, which already includes as the central European Metaportal millions of digitized objects. Besides a brief introduction to the thinkMOTION project, the following sections focus on key aspects of the used workflow, the rights clarification, the creating of a work environment for library users and the issue of searching/browsing as well as multilingualism.

Solutions for most present-day problems in the field of motion systems can be derived from existing designs. Unfortunately, large portions of this knowledge are difficult to access, since it is scattered over the world's libraries, museums, companies, universities, and other institutions. Also, it is stored in various forms, like textual descriptions, images, or diagrams.In recent years there have been efforts to digitalize sources of design solutions and make them available on the Internet. However, most of these repositories represent information in a way that does not meet the requirements of engineering designers concerning the retrieval of specific solutions.Furthermore, the presented paper shows the importance of design solution repositories and discusses methods and tools necessary to extract design solutions from sources and to describe them with metadata based on terms and concepts of motion science. These steps are important since they form essential prerequisites to allow target-oriented retrieval of solutions.

Seit 2004 fördert die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ein Leistungszentrum für Forschungsinformation zur Sammlung, Bewahrung, Systematisierung, Vernetzung und geeigneten Präsentation des umfangreichen Wissens über Mechanismen und Getriebe. Bei diesem Projekt mit dem Namen „Digitale Mechanismenund Getriebebibliothek“ (DMG-Lib) werden neben Textdokumenten und Bildern auch computergestützte Funktionsmodelle bereitgestellt, die die Nutzer der DMG-Lib in Verbindung mit Simulationsund Analysesoftware verwenden können. Die Funktionsmodelle werden aus technischen Darstellungen extrahiert, in der DMG-Lib gespeichert und auch dort nutzbringend eingesetzt, z.B. für erweiterte Suchfunktionen. Der Artikel beschreibt die Vorgehensweise und erläutert anhand der Beispiele den momentanen Stand der Arbeiten. Ergänzt werden die Ausführungen durch zukünftige Aufgaben.

In the past it was often adequate to assemble an overall system from separately developed and optimized Forts. However, recent developments in engineering show the need to integrate mechanical, optical, electrical, electronical and software components. This new quality of interdisciplinary collaboration requires new computer-aided, phase- and domain-spanning tools for modeling, analysis, simulation and optimization of complex design objects particularly in the early phases of product development:. The article covers the first intermediate results of the ongoing research concerning a phase-overlapping design software tool for heterogeneous systems that supports the transition from the solution principle to embodiment design. Finally more general remarks, theses and questions concerning procedures, methods and tools for a domain-spanning and phase-overlapping design arc presented to encourage a discussion. These thoughts base mostly on common statements and views in german literature.

We are presenting a digital engineering library – the Digital Mechanism and Gear Library (DMG-Lib). The existing worldwide knowledge in form of books, drawings, physical models etc. is mostly scattered, difficult to access and does not comply with today’s requirements concerning a rapid information retrieval. Therefore the development of a digital, internet-based library for mechanisms and gears is necessary, which makes the worldwide knowledge about mechanisms and gears available: http://www.dmg-lib.org. The Digital Mechanism and Gear Library is of particular importance not only for engineers, product designers and researchers, but also for teachers, students and historians.

The development of innovative products is based on the generation of new concepts. For evaluation and selection of potential innovative solutions it is important to understand and predict their properties. To do this in the early design phases the designer needs special methods and tools. Virtual prototyping is such a method and it can be applied even in early design phases. The paper presents a computer supported tool for this purpose and shows applications of function modeling in the conceptual design phase dealing with the development of ultra high precision positioning and measuring machines as well as mechanisms. The aim is the generation of a quantified layout as the base for subsequent design phases, especially the embodiment design.

The DMG-Lib is an interdisciplinary project that was started to collect and preserve knowledge concerning mechanical devices. In contrast to common digital libraries an efficient problem oriented information retrieval will be supported. The realization of the long-term project is only possible by means of extensive employment of computational kinematics, which opens up multifaceted prospects—especially according to the efficiency of the workflow and the efficiency of the access to the knowledge space. Aside from a common survey of the DMG-Lib project the paper shows, how kinematic models are extracted, stored and applied. The described approaches are practically proved or work in progress as well as future work which shall be discussed on the workshop.

In early design phases three main levels of abstraction (the function, the principle and the embodiment design) can be distinguished, which describe results of the synthesis process. Suitable representations exist for these three levels of abstraction. For a continuous computeraided product design a phase overlapping multi-stage modeling is necessary, which connects the different abstraction levels and the according representations. The aim of the paper is the presentation of a concept for multi-stage modeling and first results of an according software implementation, which supports an iterative design. The described approach is restricted to conceptual design and to the first steps in embodiment design of mechanisms and gears.