Abstract
Many of today’s concurrent product-development cycles depend on the utilization of intelligent Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems. Thus, it would be essential to provide CAD users with effective means for interacting with the CAD system and its database. This paper addresses the development of a boundary-based coding procedure for CAD models. Coding the geometric and processing characteristics of objects, based on their CAD model representation, has been long recognized as an effective approach that allows convenient design retrieval on the one hand and process-planning automation on the other. Our work is based on the assumption that form features are recognizable and extractable from the CAD model by current feature-recognition, feature extraction and feature-based-design approaches. The coding procedure is applicable to the boundary representation of the object and its extracted form features.
