Feature-based designer's intents

Feature-based modelling is considered an improvement on existing CAD systems. Features are considered to be a medium that carries designer’s intents, but neither features nor designer’s intent have widely accepted definitions. Morphological functional designer’s intents, defined as common-sense behaviours of the (form) feature’s concept, have been defined and presented within a feature-based representation validation system [4]. The process of “feature elicitation”, frequently implied to identify and categorise features, comprises “featurization” and “featurization validation” processes which help specify an appropriate feature library to be used in a particular application. In the research reported here a similar approach, called “intent elicitation”, has been performed to identify and categorise meaningful and measurable designer’s intents from the integrated CAD/CAM and Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) domains. The resulting classification and taxonomy is presented in this paper. It can be observed that the classification encompasses morphological feature-based designer’s intents (FbDI’s), because of the feature’s concept, and is application dependent. The identified FbDI’s have been used in a feature-based reasoning system which has led to an intent-driven approach for feature-based modelling where designer’s intents are an explicit and central aspect.