Indexing and Positioning

Indexing and Positioning are assembly issues. Indexing involves designing a part so that the orientation of a part during assembly is either unmistakable or (ideally) irrelevant. The fact of assembly is that if a part can be assembled upside-down, it will be assembled upside-down.

In terms of time and money, this problem ranks low. But it is a cost that can be easily eliminated by textbook design-for-assembly principles, those of symmetry for example. These problems are hardest to compute because they rely on a view of the part as a whole. While the nature of global modeling is addressed, it goes beyond the scope of the DFM system.