The long term objective is to develop integrated software systems for automation of design, engineering, and manufacturing tasks--a technology that is needed for the computer integrated factory of the future. This requires the development of product databases that contain the totality of information related to all aspects of the product. The proposed Expert Solid Modeling Shell will provide a high level environment for developing and documenting such a database. The shell concept and object-centered programming technique are borrowed from expert system technology to provide a system that can be customized to user needs. This will allow designers to define properties of features they wish to work with, to instantiate these from a library and to manipulate them as desired. "Intelligence" will be imparted by three sets of rules: Cognition, Inheritance, and Interpretation. Cognition rules will be used for detecting invalid operations; Inheritance rules for deriving feature parameter values from parents: Interpretation rules for decoding information required by an interface while building its own multi-layered database incorporating feature relationships and descriptions. Feature taxonomy codes will be used by a post- processing program to convert design features to manufacturing features so that product data can be used to drive automated process planning, group technology classification and manufacturability evaluation programs, etc.
