Next generation process planning systems should be capable of dealing with industrial demands of versatility, flexibility, and agility for product manufacturing. Development of process planning system is heavily dependent on feature recognition, but presently there is no satisfactory feature recognition system relying on a single method. In this paper, we describe a hybrid feature recognition method for machining features that combines three feature recognition technologies: graph-based, convex volume decomposition, and maximal volume decomposition. Based on an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, we integrate them in a sequential workflow, such that each method recognizes features according to its strengths, and successively simplifies the part model for the following methods. We identify two anomalous cases arising from the application of maximal volume decomposition, and discuss their cure by introducing limiting halfspaces. All recognized features are combined into a unified hierarchical feature representation, which captures feature interaction information, including geometry-based machining precedence relations.
