About filtering IPAs by proximity

You can filter an in-process assembly (IPA) tree to focus on a particular area of the product, for example, when performing a study.

An IPA is defined for each station or other process level. It consists of an aggregation of all parts that were already assembled, for example, at previous stations. The IPA can become very large (particularly at stations near the end of the line) and may be slow to open in the assembly viewer for a study. You can use the proximity search to identify and display only neighboring objects that are relevant to the study. For example, when studying a front light assembly of a vehicle, you do not have to load the entire IPA, but can specify only parts within a 300 mm radius of the center point of the light assembly. When you do this, Teamcenter creates a persistent object that contains those parts of IPA found by the search; consequently, there is no need to search for each study.

The search ignores any modifications that were made to the parts in the IPA tree. For example, the hood may be opened to allow installation of a part in the engine and should not be included in the search results. However, if the hood is within the range of the search on the assembled car, it is included in the results.

You can send the search results in PLM XML format to external applications, for example, Process Simulate.

Related Topics

• About in-process assemblies