Abstract
Concurrent (or simultaneous) engineering has recently been proposed as a potential means to improve the product development practice. It requires the product life-cycle aspects such as manufacturing requirements to be considered during the stages of designing a part so that the design feedback on the manufacturability, assemblability and so on can be provided to the designers. To support this purpose needs the integration of geometric models, analysis and synthesis tools as well as domain knowledge while the design is in progress.
In the past few years, the concept of features has received significant attentions in the context of design and manufacturing automation. However, the application of features is currently limited, mainly due to the domain-dependent nature of features. A crucial problem has been the interpretation of multiple feature viewpoints, particularly, the conversion among feature representations, that is to support the reasoning about feature-based representations of a product design from a specific perspective and their interpretation. In this paper, important engineering perspectives and related feature-based representations supporting concurrent design and manufacturing have been identified. A methodology of interpreting different feature representations has been proposed based on a coupling between grammatical formalism and knowledge-based inference. A case study of applying this methodology to the conversion from design features based representation into representations suitable for machining process planning is reported.
