Online Exchange Of Complex Feature Operations Among Heterogeneous CAD Systems

More and more products will be collaboratively designed by different departments which are geographically distributed in today's economy globalization. Collaborative design can shorten design cycle, decrease design cost and improve design effiency for products effectively. Feature data exchange is one of the key aspects to achieve high quality collaborative design. The quality of feature data exchange will affect efficiency and quality of collaborative design directly. User defined feature(UDF) and singular feature exchange is the difficult techincal point of feature data exchange. UDF and singular feature exchange among heterogeneous CAD systems are researched in this paper.Main work of the paper includes following:(1) An UDF real time exchange method which is based on netural modeling command is proposed to meet the requirement of mainstream CAD system UDF exchange. At the beginning, the netural command representation of UDF is presented by analyzing the definition and initialization of commercial CAD system's UDF. Then the translation methods between system UDF and neutral UDF command are proposed and the solution to the translation of UDF difference is emphasized. At last, the methods of UDF modification and deletion operation exchange in realtime are given.(2) We brings up an singular feature exchange approach based on geometry operations to meet the requirement of mainstream CAD system singular feature exchange. Firstly, the neutral command represenation of singular feature is given which is corresponding to the approach. Then the translation methods between singular feature and neutral command of singular feature are presented.(3) The framework of feature exchange among heterogeneous CAD systems in real time is extended to support model recovery after interruption by introducing neutral modeling command server. Experimental results show that the exchange methods for UDF and singular features can support UDF and singular feature exchange among heterogeneous CAD systems effectively.