Analyzing and Implementing a Feature Mapping Approach to CAD System Interoperability

Interoperable information exchange between computer-aided design (CAD) systems is one of the major problems to enable information integration in a collaborative engineering environment. Although a significant amount of work has been done on the extension and standardization of CAD data formats as well as the cooperation of CAD systems in both academy and industry, these approaches are generally low-level and narrowly targeted. Lack of fundamental study of interoperability and generic solution to this problem is the major issue. Our intention of this research is to design a solution of CAD feature interoperability as generic as possible based on a theoretical foundation of language types. In this paper, we present a fundamental model of semantic features and feature mapping process based on the type theory. We implement and demonstrate our approach for automated feature exchange between commercial CAD systems.