Design to manufacturing feature mapping techinques

In Concurrent Engineering (CE), a design plan is evaluated from the view of the whole product life cycle. The two basic feature sets involved in CE are design features and manufacturing features. Design features contribute to the design construct basis in terms of additive or subtractive volumes, and their semantics reflect the design intent and function. On the other hand, manufacturing features are normally removed from the manufacturing stock in terms of subtractive volumes. They are closely related with manufacturability analysis and process planning activities such as the configuration of workpiece holding, choice of machines and cutting tools, and planning of the machining operations. An intelligent manufacturing feature recognition from a design model can provide a seamless interface between design and manufacturing applications. The proposed methodology in the thesis maps features from design domain to manufacturing domain. The methodology used is CAD system independent, and works with a neutral file format. Thus, it can accept heterogenous inputs, i.e. it can convert design features from various CAD system into manufacturing features.