Production ready feature recognition based automatic group technology part coding

Abstract

During the past four years, a feature recognition based expert system for automatically performing group technology part coding from solid model data has been under development. The system has become a production quality tool, capable of quickly determining the geometry based portions of a part code with no human intervention. It has been tested on over 200 solid models, half of which are models of production Sandia designs. Its performance rivals that of humans performing the same task, often surpassing them in speed and uniformity. The feature recognition capability developed for part coding is being extended to support other applications, such as manufacturability analysis, automatic decomposition (for finite element meshing and machining), and assembly planning. Initial surveys of these applications indicate that the current capability will provide a strong basis for other applications and that extensions towards more global geometric reasoning and tighter coupling with solid modeler functionality will be necessary.