Extracting and updating Mass as a parameter in inventor for an optimisation problem

[teranceU3ZEE]

I am using Inventor along with an optimization program called HEEDS in a mass minimization problem. There are 2 gripper arms in the assembly. The dimensions of the 2 arms is varied between an upper and lower bound using HEEDS to carry out the mass minimization. I have successfully exported the dimension parameters (length, breadth, etc.) to Heeds as input to be varied. One of the boundary conditions for the problem is that, the difference between the masses of the 2 arms in the assembly should not be greater than a numerical value. For that reason, the masses of the individual arms needs to be extracted from inventor. I did this by creating a rule: 

mass_B1 = iProperties.Mass

 for the Arm 1 and:

mass_B2 = iProperties.Mass

for arm 2. I then created 2 user defined numerical parameters in the 2 arms as 'mass_B1' and 'mass_B2' respectively and executed the rule, and I was able to extract mass as a parameter. I am able to extract these parameters to HEEDS, but my issue is that they are not getting updated when the dimensions are varied. I am assuming, the problem lies where the rule is not getting executed, after the geometry is changed. My question is: Is there a way to execute the rule as a macro or a journal, after the geometry is changed? Or is there any setting that I can turn on, where the rule gets executed automatically when there is a geometry change?

[bradeneuropeArthur · Accepted solution]

Run these rules after one of these:

[teranceU3ZEE]

Thank You. It worked perfectly.

[Rich-T]

Just a thought for you - I find it helpful to display the model mass on screen in a general annotation note.

You could do something similar with the event trigger solution above and your B1 & B2 model parameters, so they are always updated and displayed on screen when you edit the model.

You might then get a bit fancy with it and have a third parameter to calculate and display the +/- mass change for the most recent geometry edit.