Abstract
Feature based modeling has been used as a means to bridge the gap between engineering design and manufacturing. Features can represent an artifact with higher level entities which relate directly to its design functionalities and manufacturing characteristics, such as surface finish, manufacturability, fits, tolerance etc. In this study, a heuristic based feature recognition approach is proposed by using the graph representation of a design. The process consists of two steps: subgraph construction, and subgraph to feature identification. In this study, the subgraph construction is accomplished by using a set of heuristic rules. The process of subgraph to feature identification is carried out with a set of integers and characters which represent the geometric, topological, and semantic characteristics of the corresponding feature. This feature recognition scheme is used for the identification of machine features in a design.