Design reuse in a CAD environment — Four case studies

This paper presents two methods for storage and reuse of detailed engineering designs for efficient and adaptive reuse. The Generative Method [1], invokes techniques such as ‘interactive Feature Recognition’ and a ‘Parametric CSG-Tree’ to produce a design model suitable for adaptive and innovative design. While the Variant Method [2], was subsequently developed to overcome the complexities of creating a generative CAD model and is better suited to the representation of families of similar designs.