A representation of assembly and process planning knowledge for feature-based design

The need for a product model which can support the modelling requirements of a broad range of applications leads to the application of feature-based techniques. An important requirement in featurebased design and manufacture is that a single feature representation should be capable of supporting a number of different applications. Assembly and process planning are seen as two crucial applications and a formal structure for their representation in a feature-based design system is presented. This research described addresses two basic questions relating to the lack of a unified definition for features and the problem of representing assemblies in a feature-based representation. A prototype system has been implemented using object-oriented techniques which provide a natural method of adding functionality to the geometric reasoning process of features and the complex relationships between the parts that make up the assembly. The feature-based model has been implemented using the ACIS object-oriented solid modeller kernel.