Design information reuse for free-form shape and the distributed design reuse system architecture

Abstract

Free-form feature shapes are prevalent in automotive, aeronautic, and aerospace industries, etc. The traditional free-form feature shapes design method based on surface control points or lattices has the following faults: difficult editing and modification, operating semantic ambiguity, long time-consuming, designing inefficiently, and so forth. The reuse of free-form feature information is achieving significant attraction in geometric modeling. Wavelet and its multiresolution analysis theory in CAGD/CG and CAD domains have been found to be very effective in treating geometric modeling and free-form feature surface design due to its properties of localization both in time/spatial and frequency domains. We introduce the fundamentals of wavelet and wavelet multiresolution analysis, and discuss how wavelet multiresolution technology is applied to design reuse for free-form feature shapes design by virtue of the wavelet decomposition and reconstruction algorithm. The approach indicates that the design information reuse of free-form feature surface not only improves the efficient of surface design, but is of great benefit to the surface modification and editing, and definite shape semantics, etc. We develop a multi-agent distributed system architecture environment supporting design information reuse. The collaboration and communication among the multi-agents in the system architecture are based on ontologies.