Incremental Recognition of Machining Features

Abstract

Abstract Manufacturing analysis programs that operate in a batch mode are inappropriate for a concurrent engineering environment, in which designers interact with an evolving product model and require rapid feedback on the manufacturing implications of design actions. This paper discusses a design for an automatic recognizer of machining features that operates incrementally, updating its results efficiently after each design step. The Incremental Feature Finder (IFF) builds upon an earlier, batch recognizer called OOFF, developed at USC in the late 1980s. IFF exploits spatial locality and feature dependency information, stored in a Truth Maintenance System, to improve its performance.