A repository for design, process planning and assembly

This paper provides an introduction to the Design, Planning and Assembly Repository available through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The goal of the Repository is to provide a publically accessible collection of 2D and 3D CAD and solid models from industry problems. In this way, research and development efforts can obtain and share examples, focus on benchmarks, and identify areas of research need. The Repository is available through the World Wide Web at URL for collaboration, allowing, researchers to post challenge problems to a wide audience, share results, or perform larger-scale experiments requiring bigger data sets with industrially relevant data. It is our belief that establishment of this Internet-enabled communal library will hasten advances in solid modeling and application areas such as manufacturing process planning, feature recognition, and assembly planning. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 overviews the current status and content of the Repository, describing the manufacturing domains it covers and giving a number of examples. Section 3 discusses research issues that either emerged during development and population of the Repository and outlines some of the new problems which can be addressed based on the Repository's contents. Section 4 gives concluding remarks. INTRODUCTION The Design, Planning and Assembly Repository is an effort at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) joining government agencies, industry, and acade-mia to provide a library of example data for use by the research community. This data includes 2D and 3D designs and solid models, assemblies and process planning information. This paper introduces the Repository and gives an overview of its contents and structure. It is the goal of the Repository is to give researchers access to a wide variety of problems taken from industry-thus improving the base of common working knowledge for the community and giving students access to challenging and high-impact problems. The Repository will also provide a focal point