Intelligent Retrieval and Reuse of CAD Solid Models

The fact that a lot of time in a manufacturing industry is spent in searching for similarly shaped designs from a database of previously manufactured parts and the fact that most of the new designs are modified versions of previous designs, resulted in the need for an efficient system for retrieval and reuse of CAD models. Features and the spatial relationships between the features, form a signature, which can be used to uniquely identify each part. Using this signature we develop an indexing scheme to speed up database searching. In this work we propose a content based search technique to retrieve similar parts from a database of old parts. We also perform a running time analysis of the search and retrieve algorithm.