Solid Freeform Fabrication and Parametric Engineering

Solid freeform fabrication (SFF) is based on a part-centric process model: create a solid model of the part, form planar slices, and fabricate the part by producing all of the polyhedra by any of several methods. A class of applications is emerging which will pull SFF from the part-centric model to a new paradigm in which parts are seen as components of interactive networks. This is precisely the context for which parametric engineering has been proposed. In this paper, a computational framework will be developed that consists of a finitary topological representation of parts as 3-manifolds and representation of the evaluative context by means of a symbolic environment. Parametric engineering is interpreted as a controlled evaluation of parameters within the context of the symbolic environment.