A UNIFIED REPRESENTATION OF GEOMETRIC CONSTRAINT PROBLEMS TO SUPPORT DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING APPLICATIONS

摘要

This research is based on the premise that a large number of problems in a variety of mechanical design and manufacturing domains can be mapped to a finite set of generic geometric problems. This paper presents only the representation aspects, which include not only the entities and their relationships at several levels of abstraction but also geometric tasks. To induce comprehensiveness we start at a very high level, listing many queries/commands arising in mechanical design and manufacturing and generalize these into a small set of generic queries/commands. In doing this we find it necessary to devise a new type of high level entity, the geometry characterization which is described with examples. To ensure tractability we start at a low level, describing primitive entities and constraints, and functions, and work our way up through compound entities and constraints. The end goal of this project is to produce an application independent system for geometric constraint solving and querying that can be integrated with any design or manufacturing application using a standardized representation.