Retrieval of technical drawings in DXF format - concepts and problems

Nowadays, launching new products in short intervals is a critical factor for success to persist on the global market. At the same time many enterprises call for cost reduction in all of their divisions. Especially development departments have to increase their effectiveness and efficiency by lowering development time and costs to preserve the competitiveness of the company. Since development processes are affected by a plethora of information and knowledge, a starting point for time and cost reduction is to reuse existing design knowledge. This knowledge consists of both text documents and special kinds of artifacts such as 3D models, technical specifications, technical drawings, or bills of material. While the retrieval of text documents and 3D models is already explored widely in the research area, retrieving technical drawings is still a complex and interesting field of investigation. Therefore, this paper deals with existing search techniques for technical drawings and the problems emerging from implementing such techniques for Drawing Interchange Format (DXF) drawings. Moreover, we propose a general procedure for the extraction of features from such drawings to solve these problems.