Design rules are an essential interface to facilitate the information exchange between designers and experts. Despite many innovations in Knowledge-Based Engineering and Knowledge Management, unstructured design rules documents are still widely used in the manufacturing industry. Due to the complexity of the design process, these documents often contain hundreds of design rules, applicable in varying design contexts. Searching for the right rules according to a design context is demanding in time and cognitive resources. In this paper, we propose a Context-Aware Cognitive Design Assistant (CACDA) to capture the design context and perform tasks such as the recommendation of design rules, the verification of design solutions, or the automation of design routines. Contrary to existing works in model quality testing, the CACDA uses a proactive approach of design rules application and helps designers to provide error-free designs on first attempt. In this paper, we present the design rules recommendation system of the CACDA, its capabilities and its implementation. Then, to measure the impact of design rules recommendations on the design process, we compare our approach with the use of traditional design rules documents. Results show that the use of the CACDA’s design rules recommendations lower the perceived difficulty of design rules retrieval from 75 to 43.5 on a scale of 100. On average, participants that used the demonstrator successfully applied 8.6 design rules on the 25 applicable design rules of our set. Participants that used unstructured documentation correctly applied 4.3 design rules. The global cognitive weight of the design activity as well as the design rules retrieval performances appear to be unchanged. These results demonstrate the usability of the demonstrator and show a positive impact on the design process and on the quality of CAD models. Future works will focus on the overcome of the main limitations of our current experiments, with a panel of professional designers, a lager design rules set and the implementation of several lacking features of the CACDA into the demonstrator. 相似文献
An efficient encoding algorithm for lossless compression of triangle mesh connectivity is presented to further optimize the compression ratio. The algorithm firstly cuts a given mesh into a cutaway graph, then uses a triangle nodes tree to present the graph, containing the triangle strips topology information on the graph in the adjacency relationships between the leaf nodes and the branch nodes, reducing the mesh topology information needed to be encoded. Finally, we use the minimum interior angle maximum principle to predict the internal topology of the triangle strips, only encoding the prediction error elements, thus further reducing the information needed to be encoded. Compared with the current compression algorithms, this algorithm does not traverse the triangular mesh, only encoding and storing a small amount of mesh topology information and prediction information. Experimental results show that the algorithm can greatly reduce the compression ratios and process various triangle meshes. 相似文献