A Novel Hybrid Design Representation for Automatic Design Features Recognition Systems

Problems of design similarity identification and elements grouping play a key factor in the development of design standardization and the group technology methods. Design similarity identification methods are most often based on a comparison of codes ascribed to products design. Basically the code makes a quantitative product description including different product features. Whereas a qualitative description has constituted rather supplement of a quantitative description. The most important issue in a process of design similarity identification is a method of a product design description. This description is usually made with use of special codes composed of alphanumeric characters. The coding process allows reducing the number of data which are being processed during design similarity evaluation, but on the other hand in some cases it could cause information loss. Taking into account above there is still a need of working out of a new method of a product design description which will be able to reduce these negative features of coding techniques. In the paper a novel approach for a product design description is presented. It is proposed to apply a hybrid method for a design representation purpose. This method uses a combination of code chains for a product longitudinal cross-section representation and a spatial matrix for transvers sections. As a result of the conducted research a new method of a product design description was worked out. This method is especially suggested for application in automatic design feature recognition systems (AFR systems) in which a design feature database (DFD) is present.