A persistent naming of shells

Nowadays, many commercial CAD systems support history-based, constraint-based and feature-based modeling. Unfortunately, most systems fail during the re-evaluation phase when various kind of topological changes occur. This issue is known as "persistent naming" which refers to the problem of identifying entities in an initial parametric model and matching them in the re-evaluated model. Most works in this domain focus on the persistent naming of atomic entities such as vertices, edges or faces. But very few of them consider the persistent naming of aggregates like shells (connected set of faces). We propose in this paper a complete framework for extending a persistent naming model of atomic entities in order to identify and match any kind of shells based on their underlying topology.