Construction of Parent-child Relationships among the Topological Elements in Feature-based CAD Models

In the integration research of CAD/CAM/CAE,it is important to rapidly access and obtain the relevant information of CAD models by constructing the parent-child relationships among the topological elements of the feature-based CAD models.However,deriving the parent-child relationships is baffled by the imperfectness of the current generic naming mechanisms,which will be built laboriously.A solution to this problem is presented by going from the easy to the complicated,which reduces the search scope step by step.The parent-child relationships are constructed in the order of vertices,edges and faces.The topological elements without the parent-child relationships can be firstly filtered out by the comparison of the topological elements' types,bounding boxes and boundaries.The parent-child relationships can be finally determined by exactly comparing the geometric information of topological elements.Experiments show that the method can efficiently recognize the parent-child relationships of the topological elements in the feature-based CAD models and also offers a way to rapidly access the information of CAD models.