Patent ID: 7725206

Claim:
A system for manufacturing an assembly, comprising: (a) a metrology device for measuring the location of at least one characteristic of a statistically significant part or plurality of parts of an as-built assembly relative to a parametric reference point of the as-built assembly during manufacture and creating parametric coordinate data regarding said location in-real time; (b) a computer-readable storage medium storing a first theoretical computer-aided design model for said part or plurality of parts; and (c) a computer-aided design system coupled to said metrology device and said compute readable storage medium using a communications link, wherein said computer-aided design system: obtains said parametric coordinate data from said metrology device representative of the location of the characteristic relative to the parametric reference point; creates an as-built computer-aided design model in synchronized real-time reflecting the parametric coordinate data of the as-built assembly; and imports data associated with said first theoretical computer-aided design model into the as-built computer-aided design model.