Feature extraction and feature based design approaches in the development of design interface for process planning

The quest for completely automated process planning systems has exposed the lack of techniques capable of automatically understanding the stored CAD models in a manner suitable for process planning. Most current generations of process planning systems have used the ability of humans to translate the part drawing requirements into a form suitable for computer aided process planing. Recently, research advances have been made to improve the understanding of computer stored 3-D part models. The two approaches used are feature recognition and feature based design. This paper presents a state of the art review of feature recognition techniques developed and presents feature based design as an alternative. Process planning systems developed using both approaches are presented.