Virtual Prototyping through Feature Processing

Abstract

For the integration of different product development tasks to be supported within a virtual prototyping process it is necessary to take account of semantic information, alongside the geometric shape information. The need of semantically endowed primitives leads to the use of features. In this paper we focus on one crucial important aspect in which virtual prototyping systems should evolve: the feature-based design of product prototypes. This will offer possibilities to users to define high-level semantic information in the prototype model in a way which allows a high degree of correspondence between virtual prototype and physical product. Moreover, features should be used as processing entities for design, as well as for the information integration of design with different downstream phases of virtual prototyping such as analysis, manufacturing simulation, cost and quality estimation.Key WordsVirtual prototypingsemantic product modelingfeaturesfeature processingfeature-based design module