Common design structure discovery from CAD models

This paper presents a method to solve the problem of common design structure discovery from a large number of CAD models. First, a CAD model is transformed into a face adjacency graph (FAG) and each node of FAG is mapped to a point in two-dimensional plane after representing face shape information with two coordinates. So the shapes of models are directly compared through the point coordinates of FAGs´ nodes. Thus, the common design structures are just the frequent appearing subgraphs of FAGs. Second, we develop an algorithm to discovery frequent subgraphs of FAGs. The main steps of the algorithm include: (1) frequent candidate subgraph generation based on merging of last discovered frequent subgraphs; (2)subgraph matching with graph descriptive code. The experiment shows a reasonable result of the discovered common design structures with our approach.