Use of Drawings Archive for Design Process

The drawings archive of a company is an important font of information that could be used during the design process. In fact, it is a collection of known and proven solutions to design problems and, also, the drawings include a variety of information useful to design such as physical principles to achieve a function or solutions of particular machine design problems. The use of these data is however conditioned by easiness of access to the information. Normally, the drawings archive is not structured in a useful manner for the design and the retrieve of the information contained requires effort and time that are not often available to the designer. The use of database systems and informatics tools, as Product Data Management (PDM) or Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) systems, can allow company to add more attributes to the drawing during its storage, allowing a different access to the information. This work proposes an example about the organization of the information based on the functional structure of a product. The organization proposed was also used to catalogue the data stored in relation to the standards required to the product. This to demonstrate how much information is hided into the historical archives of a company and how much it could be useful during the design process.