This workshop will address the issue of features in design and manufacturing. Features can be given to describe physical and functional aspects of designs or can be extracted from designs to describe manufacturing processes. The relationships among features, designs, and manufacturing will be described from several points of view including 1) design generation, 2) product models, 3) design databases, representation and display, 4) design analysis, 5) manufacturing, and 6) process planning and assembly. The workshop will focus on problems concerning the identification of features, their rigorous formal characterization, and the application of these descriptions in computational approaches to design and manufacturing. Current questions concerning the role features play in the automation of design and manufacturing will be address and directions for future research will be outlined. The workshop is especially timely owing to a growing number of formal results in areas such as solid modelling, databases, and grammatical techniques that suggest that design and manufacturing can be approached computationally. It is felt that the goal of automated design and manufacturing will be significantly advanced by bringing together researchers with a formal point of view from different design and manufacturing areas to share ideas. The workshop is planned for early 1988 at the University of California Los Angeles.
