| Abstract | The availability of low-cost computational power is a drivingforce behind the growing sophistication of CAD software. Tools designed
to reduce time-consuming build-test-redesign iterations are essential
for increasing engineering quality and productivity. However, automation
of the design process poses many difficult computational problems. As
more downstream engineering activities are being considered during the
design phase, guaranteeing reasonable response times within design
systems becomes problematic. Design is an interactive process and speed
is a critical factor in systems that enable designers to explore and
experiment with alternative ideas during the design phase. Achieving
interactivity requires an increasingly sophisticated allocation
of computational resources in order to perform realistic design analyses
and generate feedback in real time.
This paper presents our initial efforts to develop techniques to
apply distributed algorithms to the problem of recognizing machining
features from solid models. Existing work on recognition of features has
focused exclusively on serial computer architectures. Our objective is to
show that distributed algorithms can be employed on realistic parts
with large numbers of features and many geometric and topological
entities to obtain significant improvements in computation time using
existing hardware and software tools. Migrating solid modeling applications
toward a distributed computing framework enables interconnection of many of
the autonomous and geographically diverse software tools used in the
modern manufacturing enterprise.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-126.1)
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