As the product life cycles become shorter, and the product variety increases, it has become crucial to minimize the lag period between the start of a product's design and the time it is manufactured. It is also crucial to be able to produce products in small to medium quantities in a cost effective manner with high quality. The objectives of this project are to develop a qualitative model of geometry and structure, a new case-based method for construction of manufacturing process plans for three dimensional objects, and new representation and reasoning methods for recognition of features and modeling of features defined by the users. Investigation will be performed and a computer based environment for integrated issues will be developed. The computer based system will be tested on different sets of components, and will be used to assess the capabilities and limitations of the underlying models. ***
