Design reuse oriented partial retrieval of CAD model

Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 571 88206681x524; fax: +86 571 88206680. E-mail addresses: baijing@ (J. Bai), smgao@ (S. Gao), tangweihua@ (W. Tang), ysliu@ (Y. Liu), guosong@ (S. Guo). 0010-4485/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cad.2010.07.002
Jing Bai a,b , Shuming Gao a,∗ , Weihua Tang a , Yusheng Liu a , Song Guo a
a b
State Key Lab. of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, 388 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou 310058, China Department of Computer Science and Engineering, North University for Ethnics, Yinchuan 750021, China
articl huge number of 3D CAD models is generated each year, retrieval of 3D CAD models is becoming more and more important for achieving design reuse. However, the existing methods for partial retrieval of 3D CAD models are very few and far from the requirements of design reuse. In this paper, we present an approach to partial retrieval of 3D CAD models for design reuse. The criteria for determining whether a subpart of 3D CAD models is reusable for design is defined first. Based on the criteria defined, all the design reusable subparts involved in the 3D CAD models in the library are automatically extracted and stored in the library as reference models. Moreover, each design reusable subpart in the library is represented by all its local matching regions in a hierarchical way so as to support multi-mode partial retrieval. In our approach, three partial retrieval modes including normal retrieval, exact retrieval and relaxed retrieval are defined to meet various partial retrieval requirements of design reuse such as the incomplete and vague queries during the early design stage. And the multi-mode partial retrieval is achieved by performing multi-mode matching and similarity assessment between the query and the design reusable subparts in the library indexed by bitmap. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Computer-Aided Design 42 (2010) 1069–1084
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Computer-Aided Design
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Design reuse oriented partial retrieval of CAD models
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model (Fig. 1(d)) searched out by an incomplete query (Fig. 1(b)) and completed the design. In recent years, the research on PR of geometric models has been paid more and more attention, and several methods have been proposed. However, most of them cannot meet the requirements of design reuse. One reason is that, the retrieval mechanisms of these methods find all models with similar subparts to the query but do not check whether these subparts are reusable for designs or not. In this way, the retrieved CAD models are usually not available for reuse. In fact, as pointed out by [3], one of the big challenges for reuse oriented retrieval is how to make sure the retrieved CAD models are reusable. Another reason is that, since current methods normally perform rigid matching between subparts, they cannot effectively support the PR with incomplete (not complete in structure) and vague (not accurate in geometry) queries that is crucial to design reuse. As pointed out by [4], the designer in the early design stage often has just an incomplete and fuzzy idea, making it difficult to formulate a complete and concise query. Therefore, the PR for design reuse should allow incomplete and vague queries. Based on the solid modeling theory, graph theory and information retrieval theory, this paper presents a design reuse oriented PR method for feature-based CAD models, which is intended to solve the difficulties described above. The method extracts reusable subparts of CAD models as reference subparts, making sure that the retrieved subparts are not only similar to
Article history: Received 14 September 2009 Accepted 13 July 2010 Keywords: Partial retrieval CAD model Design reuse Multi-mode Reusable subpart
1. Introduction Wide applications of 3D CAD systems in industries have generated a huge number of digital 3D CAD models. Reuse of these models and the knowledge embedded is becoming an important way to facilitate new designs [1]. Many methods for 3D CAD models retrieval have been proposed to help users efficiently locate the desired models for reuse. However, most of these methods focus only on global retrieval instead of partial retrieval (PR). In fact, PR is very important, especially for design reuse [2]. For engineering applications, many common subparts of different 3D CAD models are likely to be reusable for design. Here, a subpart of a 3D CAD model refers to a part of the model that does not cover the whole model but has certain semantics. And we define the subpart that consists of a set of simple features and may appear in different 3D CAD models as a reusable subpart in this work. Reuse of them or the knowledge embedded could effectively inspire designs and speed up the design process. Fig. 1 shows an exemplar process of design reuse based on PR: to design a door (Fig. 1(e)), the designer started with a simple base (Fig. 1(a)), reused the desired hinge