Feature Recognition for Interactive Applications: Exploiting Distributed Resources

The availability of low-cost computational power is enabling development of increasingly sophisticated CAD software. Automation of design and manufacturing activities poses many diicult computational problems. Design is an interactive process and speed is a critical factor in systems that enable designers to explore and experiment with alternative ideas. As more downstream manufacturing activities are considered during the design phase, computational costs become problematic. Achieving interactivity requires a sophisticated allocation of computational resources in order to perform realistic design analyses and generate feedback in real time. This paper presents our initial eeorts to use distributed algorithms to recognize machining features from solid models of parts with large numbers of features and many geometric and topological entities. Our goal is to outline how signiicant improvements in computation time can be obtained using existing hardware and software tools. An implementation of our approach is discussed.