9522806 Shapiro Solid modeling technology is rapidly becoming the primary means for creating, exchanging, and maintaining information across all engineering functions and applications. Existing solid modeling systems have been developed in response to specific applications, and hence rely on a variety of representation schemes as well as new representations and engineering languages that combine elements of distinct representations in ad hoc fashion. The goal of this research is to develop a comprehensive, mathematically sound, and standard technology for maintenance of solid models, representations, and systems in support of diverse engineering applications. The proposed approach and methods are based on the established and experimentally verified theory of space decompositions. In the short term, the results of this research should further the acceptance, integration, and standardization of solid modeling technology in mechanical design and manufacturing. It should lead to significant productivity gains and improvements in feature-based and parametric design methods. More generally, the establishment of rigorous computational connections between different solid model representations has been cited by a recent National Research Council report as a key component of the information technology that will be needed for manufacturing in the future. The work will potentially lead to more efficient methods for designing and representing parts. Such a method will allow the interchange of design data among different design systems.
