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The Product Structure Model

A product is something that can be designed, manufactured and produced within an industrial context. A product can be a car, a vacuum cleaner or a drill, for example.

A product is made up of different components. When you design a product, you must determine what components are to be used to create it. Then, each component must be designed in turn. The ProductStructure framework is an organizational and management tool allowing the assembly of the different components making up the final product. This assembly yields a product structure in the form of a tree.

Components making up a product may themselves be products. It is worthwhile to design a product from components that can be reused, because then, once a component has been created in the form of a product, it can be reused as a component for other products as well.

In CATIA Version 5, there exists a specific type of document dedicated to the management and storage of data related to a product structure. It is called a CATProduct document and it is created with a specific root product. The branches of the product structure all start from this root product object.

So, basically, to create a product structure, you must:

• Create a CATProduct document
• Retrieve the root product element of this document
• Add as many new components (in the form of other products or of parts) to the root product or to other products already defined
• Add as many more components as you need.

A component is an instance of either an existing CATProduct or CATPart document or V4 Model, or of an "in place"- created CATProduct or CATPart document. Only CATPart and CATProduct documents can be used since only their structure contains a root product. An "in place"-created document must also be saved as a separate entity. The document corresponding to the imported component is called the reference. A part or product in a product structure is defined by two names:

• the reference name, also called the Part Number, is the name of the root product element of the reference document, and
• the product instance name is the name of the particular instance of the document that is imported as a component.

This means that if two new components are imported from the same reference document, they will have the same reference name, or Part Number, but different instance names.

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