Development of an Extensible System Supporting Feature-based Simplification of a CAD Model

Feature-based simplification among various CAD model simplification methods is known as a suitable method for various engineering activities such as engineering analysis, plant design, network-based distributed collaborative design, virtual prototyping, and digital manufacturing. Nevertheless, there is no commercial CAD system to support it. Therefore, it is still difficult to simplify CAD models designed by commercial CAD systems. In addition, since the simplification strategy depends on the purpose of simplification, there is a need for a way that the user can easily select or expand the strategy. To resolve this problem, we propose an extensible feature-based simplification system. The proposed system is designed to integrate with various commercial CAD systems and extend the simplification strategy. In this paper, the structure and interface method of the proposed system are described, and the implementation results are presented.