A note on the use of STEP for interfacing design to process planning

This short note demonstrates the use of standard for exchange of product data (STEP) for interfacing design to process planning via a compact feature recogniser. The methodology used in development of the interface (feature recogniser) makes use of both automatic feature-recognition and feature-based design technologies in order to combine their advantages, and the STEP for the non-problematic and full information exchange. Using the abilities of the STEP, a generic configuration scheme is developed in which the features are treated as a combination of faces to which geometrical and/or technical information is glued (associated). By this way, the designer is only forced to identify the functional parts of the features when designing the part, which may simplify the component design and result in the effective memory utilisation. The feature recogniser was implemented in C on a PC and tested on a large number of examples with positive results. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.