Intent-driven reasoning priorities in a feature-based validation system

Feature-based representation validation seeks to find means to verify feature-based representations in order to guarantee that feature's expected behaviours are met and that applications that use the representation can be sure of the correctness of the feature-related data. To achieve this, a clear definition of features and their behaviour is needed but cannot be found in the literature. Instead of proposing yet another feature definition, an attempt was made to define some basic common-sense characteristics for (prismatic) features that could be tested, analysed and manipulated. These characteristics are called Intents because features are said to be the carriers of designer's intents. Feature-based Designer's Intents (DI's) proved to be essential to the validation framework because they define the scope of the Feature-based Modelling (FBM) utilisation. Also, some DI's establish clearly the geometric-dependent behaviour of features and were found to be closely related to validation. A prototype system called FRIEND, an acronym to Feature-based Reasoning system for Intent-driven ENgineering Design, was implemented to perform feature-based representation validation. This paper details Designer's Intents (DI's) in the context of deign-by-feature representation validation, presents Morphological Functional and Volumetrical DI's, their semantics and their priority organisation inside the validation mechanism, as it was implemented within FRIEND.