Product data exchange of complex shape based on parametric curve

Abstract

Product data exchange is one of most important key issues in Collaborative Product Development. Since feature-based parametric CAD systems have been dominated by industrial applications, Feature-Based Data Exchange (FBDE) is getting real growth. However the main feature-based method still lacks the ability to exchange complex shape among the heterogeneous CAD Systems. This paper attacks the problem by exchanging the parametric curve (such as Spline) which is sketched in 2D and will be used to prepare complex 3D shapes by various extrusion features. Therefore the data exchange of complex shape is divided into two layers: 3D extrusion layer and 2D sketch layer. The exchange of spline proceed in the 2D sketch layer between different CAD systems. We innovatively convert the problem of spline exchange into the problem of spline fitting, and employ the Genetic Algorithm (GA) to solve the problem. A new coding strategy in stage of initialization population is presented to improve the GA so it works well with the spline fitting among the heterogeneous CAD systems. Finally, a Hausdorff Distance (HD) is adopted to calculate the fitness. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.