CFACA: چارچوب کامپوننت برای طراحی مبتنی بر ویژگی و برنامه ریزی عملیات

Automatic generation of manufacturing information from design has been the research focus in advanced CAD/CAM applications, i.e. feature-based applications for design, process planning and other automated manufacturing applications. However, our current development mode has seriously troubled research in these application fields. For example, with our current development mode, the functionality and data of one application cannot be accessed by other applications; applications are monolithic, they are time-consuming to develop and hard to customize and update for meeting the user's requirements. Typically, each researcher has to develop independently a complete set of new monolithic application almost built from scratch to create features and then perform various process-planning functionalities. This development mode leads to such a tremendous and tough work in advanced CAD/CAM applications that, though researchers in these fields have developed countless feature-based application programs, the problem of integrating CAD and CAM applications is still largely unsolved. From the viewpoint of component technology, we seem to be wasting more time than we should be, doing ineffective work that is orders of magnitude greater and harder. The component technology, which emerged in the 1990s, has been widely regarded as the software development technology of tomorrow, and is changing the development mode of the software industry now, but has never been explored in advanced CAD/CAM application fields. The paper introduces a method of achieving the new technology in advanced CAD/CAM application fields. As an example, the paper discusses in detail the interface components in feature-based machining application domain to explain how the component technology is used in a specific advanced CAD/CAM field and how powerful the technology is. The framework in the paper is the first component framework for advanced CAD/CAM applications. Because the component technology provides developers with much more productive and powerful development mode, it is believed that this development technology is the technology of tomorrow in advanced CAD/CAM fields, and that it will change the development mode of advanced CAD/CAM applications.

Automatic generation of manufacturing information from design has been the research focus in advanced CAD/CAM applications, i.e. feature-based applications for design, process planning and other automated manufacturing applications. However, our current development mode has seriously troubled the research in these application fields and has brought us many problems. For example, it is the character of feature-based applications that, in an application-specific field, e.g. machining application domain, while most of the work is similar, each user has a different requirement, and each shop has a slightly different set of manufacturing features and a different set of tools and processes for manufacturing these features. The “correct” development mode for dealing with such a situation is, when developers develop new applications in a specific area, they should simply combine diverse binary “modules” that come from different developers into their programs and write few specific codes to meet the user's specific requirements and quickly complete their development. However, with our current development mode and technology in advanced CAD/CAM areas, the functionality and data of one application cannot be accessed or reused by other applications; applications are monolithic, they are time-consuming to develop and hard to customize and update for meeting the user's requirements. Typically, each researcher has to independently develop a complete set of a new monolithic application almost built from scratch to create the features and then perform various process-planning functionalities. This development mode leads to such a tremendous and tough work in advanced CAD/CAM applications that, though researchers in these fields have developed countless feature-based application programs, the problem of integrating CAD and CAM applications is still largely unsolved. From the viewpoint of the component technology, we seem to be wasting more time than we should be, doing ineffective work that is orders of magnitude greater and harder. The paper presents a brand new development way—the component technology to develop advanced CAD/CAM applications. The component technology emerged in the 1990s. It has been widely regarded as the software development technology of tomorrow, and is changing the development mode of the software industry now, but has never been explored in advanced CAD/CAM application fields. In this paper, the key problems that obstruct us from developing small, reusable components in advanced CAD/CAM application fields, e.g. feature-based design, process planning and other automated manufacturing, are discussed. The paper introduces a component-based framework—Component Framework for Advanced CAD/CAM Applications (CFACA)—to solve these problems. And as an example, the paper discusses in detail the interface components in feature-based machining application domain to explain how the component technology is used in a specific advanced CAD/CAM field and how powerful the technology is. It is the first component framework for advanced CAD/CAM applications. Because the component technology provides a much more productive and powerful development mode, we believe that this technology is the development technology of tomorrow in advanced CAD/CAM fields, and that it will change the development mode of advanced CAD/CAM applications. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 mainly introduces the background of components, and describes the specific key problems that obstruct us from developing small, reusable components in advanced CAD/CAM application fields. Section 3 sets forth the overall framework. Section 4 introduces the implementing tactics of the framework. In this section, we will give the concrete component model in feature-based machining application field as an example for demonstrating how to apply (achieve) the technology in a specific field and how powerful it is. Also the current research in feature-based applications will be discussed. Section 5 describes the current implementation and the future work. Section 6 discusses the role of CFACA in Advanced Product Information Framework. Section 7 concludes this work.

The paper presents a brand new development method—the component technology—which has been widely accepted as the future software development technology by the entire software world, but has never been explored in advanced CAD/CAM application fields for developing advanced CAD/CAM applications. By solving several key obstacles that obstruct us from developing small, reusable components in advanced CAD/CAM fields, this paper introduces how to achieve the powerful component technology in advanced CAD/CAM fields. It is the first component framework for advanced CAD/CAM applications. Because the component technology provides developers with a much more productive and powerful development mode, without any doubt, it is the software development technology of the future in advanced CAD/CAM fields too. The component technology will change the development mode of advanced CAD/CAM applications, and all advanced CAD/CAM fields will benefit from the technology.