A method for topological entity matching in the integration of heterogeneous CAD systems

Topological entities are always used as reference or operation objects in the feature modeling procedure. Hence, to achieve the integration of heterogeneous CAD systems, the corresponding topological entities must be found in the target CAD system to match the ones used in the source CAD system. In this paper, the topological entities' matching relations are first analyzed. Based on the analysis, a method for topological entity matching in the integration of heterogeneous CAD systems is proposed. The method consists of three key steps: information retrieval, information combination and topological entities' matching. First, the information of the topological entities used in the source CAD system is retrieved. Then, the retrieved information of those topological entities which satisfy the combination conditions is combined using the combination algorithm. Finally, for each topological entity obtained after the combination, the topological entities that satisfy the matching conditions are found using the matching algorithm in the target CAD system. The proposed method is evaluated by applying to a CAD data exchange system and a replicated heterogeneous co-design system The results demonstrate that our method works well for topological entity matching in the integration of heterogeneous CAD systems and improves the previous methods in both topological entities' combination and less-constrained concurrency control.