RECOGNITION OF NEUTRAL FEATURES FOR MULTIPLE DOMAIN ANALYSIS

The selection of an optimum manufacturing process for a part needs to be considered at the conceptual design phase to incorporate the capabilities and constraints of the process in design. Most of the existing feature recognition methods attempt to recognize domain-specific features. However, it is necessary that features recognized in one domain should map satisfactorily to other domains for effective manufacturability evaluation. This paper reviews some of the existing methods and describes a methodology of feature recognition that recognizes neutral features which can be used for multiple domain analysis. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd