An Approach to Capturing Structure, Behavior and Function of CAD Artifacts

This paper presents an approach to Computer-Aided Design that unites ideas from design with 3D layouts and knowledge engineering. Our goal is to capture the structure, behavior and function of CAD artifacts. We describe a software tool based on this approach, the Conceptual Understanding and Prototyping (CUP) environment, for capturing the design intent inherent in the design process and authoring design semantics in previously created artifacts. CUP records design ideas, based on functional, geometric and knowledge-based relationships among components in an electro-mechanical assembly. This design knowledge is stored using ontologies de ned in the eXensible Markup Language (XML). The goal of this work is to enable users to navigate intricate product data and design knowledge-bases.