GEOMETRIC REASONING AS A TOOL FOR INTEGRATING DESIGN AND PRODUCTION ACTIVITIES IN MECHANICAL ENVIRONMENT

Solid models give complete and unambiguous descriptive representations of the parts, while analysis and production activities require more qualitative representations. This paper outlines the usefulness and the power of geometric reasoning methods applied to CAD models for deriving such qualitative descriptions. First, the paper introduces the form feature concept, which allows functional representations. Then, some approaches for feature identification that make use of geometric reasoning are discussed, and some research in the area is presented.