Qualitative spatial reasoning for manufacturing features

One weakness within computer integrated manufacturing is an inability to effectively and efficiently model, reason, and make inferences about threedimensional space. In this paper, we propose a qualitative model of x component ~ccording to its features to overcome this weakness. This model consists of two key ideas: CiJ the model treats features qualitatively i.e. independent of size, orientation, and global position, and CiiJ the model mathematically represents the spatial relationships among the features. The advantage of such a model will be its ability to reason about sp~ce in order to solve problems within the manufacturing processes. In addition to presenting the model, in this paper we will provide an example reasoning task of the model to find the multiple interpretations of a component. keywords: spatial reasoning, qualitative reasoning, multiple interpretations, features