1285 What Are Feature Interactions ?

Manufacturing features and their interactions have become areas of research scrutiny in recent years. It is widely accepted that intelligent reasoning about interactions among features is a critical element in the development of systems for automated manufacturing. Conversely, however, there has not emerged any general consensus as to what features are, how they are de ned, and what it means when one says that features interact. This paper attempts to focus and re ne what is meant by the term feature interaction and outline precisely how interactions can a ect automated feature recognition and manufacturing planning. It is our belief that, by establishing a conceptual common ground with regard to these concepts, the research community will be better able to assess how to e ectively address the problems that they present.