An intelligent CAD system based on parallel processing techniques

Summary form only given. An intelligent CAD system based on parallel processing technique is described. Its hardware is an MIMD parallel system consisting of a microcomputer and multi-transputers, and the software is developed with the mixture of C language and Occam language. The CAD system adopts a feature representation scheme so as to support integrated manufacturing. A new feature model is introduced as a pair of a product model to improve design representation in a computer-integrated manufacturing environment. The feature model is a surface based design representation scheme, and has a general modeling space with a limited number of features. The system described has strong capacity for numerical computation, graphics processing and intelligent inference that ordinary sequential CAD system on microcomputers or even workstations cannot possess. However, we find that the development of its software is much more difficult than sequential ones due to currently lacking of parallel procedures that can be directly used, and some aspects need to be further studied and improved.