Data interoperability between computer-aided design (CAD) systems remains a major obstacle in the information integration and exchange in a collaborative engineering environment. The standards for CAD data exchange have remained largely restricted to geometric representations, causing the design intent portrayed through construction history, features, parameters, and constraints to be discarded in the exchange process. In this thesis, an ontology-based framework is proposed to allow for the full exchange of semantic feature data. A hybrid ontology approach is proposed, where a shared base ontology is used to convey the concepts that are common amongst different CAD systems, while local ontologies are used to represent the feature libraries of individual CAD systems as combinations of these shared concepts. A three-branch CAD feature model is constructed to reduce ambiguity in the construction of local ontology feature data. Boundary representation (B-Rep) data corresponding to the output of the feature operation is incorporated into the feature data to enhance data exchange.
The Ontology Web Language (OWL) is used to construct a shared base ontology and a small feature library, which allows the use of existing ontology reasoning tools to infer new relationships and information between heterogeneous data. A combination of OWL and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) rules are developed to allow a feature from an arbitrary source system expressed via the shared base ontology to be automatically classified and translated into the target system. These rules relate input parameters and reference types to expected B-Rep objects, allowing classification even when feature definitions vary or when little is known about the source system. In cases when the source system is well known, this approach also permits direct translation rules to be implemented. With such a flexible framework, a neutral feature exchange format could be developed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/41118 |
| Date | 23 May 2011 |
| Creators | Tessier, Sean Michael |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
Page generated in 0.0013 seconds