Development and implementation of an integrated design and manufacturing system

This study describes the development and implementation of a feature-based integrated design and manufacturing (IDM) system for machined-part modeling and manufacturability evaluation. Manufacturing information about the part model is deduced in terms of feature attributes and feature relations using spatial geometric reasoning, which in turn, is used for conducting an automated manufacturability evaluation of the part model. Previous works relating to feature relations are fragmented. In this study, attempts have been made to formalize the study of feature relations. The IDM system is implemented on a SunSparc 20 workstation using the C++ programming language. The IDM system employs ACIS v1.7 as the geometric modeler and uses advanced routine functions provided by 3D Toolkit v1.3. The graphical user interface (GUI) is developed using MOTIF.