An Attempt to Application of Chain Codes for Design Similarity Evaluation

The need of integration of all engineering activities starting from a designing stage finishing on manufacturing implies the necessity of application of a new software solution. Among them CAPP systems seem to be the best and the most promising integration tool. There are the two basic methods of the computer aided process planning it is the variant and generative methods. These CAPP modelling methods are based on the different principles. The variant method is based, in general, on the ideas of the design similarity and group technology whilst the generative one mainly on the basis of utilization of the manufacturing knowledge store and the automatic process synthesis. It is a well-known fact that the variant process planning approach is based on the hypothesis that similar parts would have similar process plans. In a CAPP variant process planning system it is necessary to look for similarities between parts. Process plans formerly prepared and stored in the CAPP system manufacturing database are used for planning of new manufacturing processes for new parts similar to those recorded in system database. In the variant system working out of the classification schema and similarity measures is essential. In this paper an attempt to application of chain codes for a design similarity evaluation is presented. The proposed procedure is based on application of the chain codes for description of the parts selected longitudinal cross sections. The proposed chain code structure is created in similar way to this used for the Freeman code formation but unlike classic Freeman chain code the parts cross section is discretized in more than the 8 cardinal directions. The characteristic feature of the proposed profile coding method is the approach for the code starting point selection. In each case the part design chain code is created starting from the a priori selected upper left corner of a product. The idea of products similarity evaluation bases on the parts profile codes and application of the minimum edit distance definitions. In the paper the Levenshtein and Hamming distance for code chains similarity comparison are proposed At the current stage of research this method is used for similarity evaluation of rotational symmetric parts. The choice of the minimum edit distance measure in the proposed solution depends on product pins number.