Maintaining associativity between form feature models

The promise of features technology was that the task domains would have access to task specific product data through feature based models. This is an important requirement in a distributed and concurrent design environment, where data of part geometry has to be shared between different task domains.Associativity between feature models implies the automatic updating of different feature models of a part after changes are made in one of its feature models. The proposed algorithm takes multiple feature models of a part as input and modifies other feature models to reflect the changes made to a feature in a feature model. The proposed algorithm updates feature volumes in other feature models and then classifies the updated volumes to obtain the updated feature model. The spatial arrangement of feature faces and adjacency relationship between features are used to isolate features in a view that are affected by the modification. Feature volumes are updated based on the classification of the feature volume of the modified feature with respect to feature volumes of the model being updated. The algorithm is capable of handling all types of feature modifications namely, feature deletion, feature creation, and changes to feature location and parameters. In contrast to current art in automatic updating of feature models, the proposed algorithm does not use an intermediate representation, does not re-interpret the feature model from a low level representation and handles interacting features. The present work considers modifications to form features only. Modification of constraints and application attributes are under investigation. Results of implementation on typical cases are presented.