An Automatic Adaptation Reuse Method for the Subparts of Parametric Solid Models

Adaptation plays a fundamental role in subpart reuse based part design and is usually human dependent. In common design works, designers often replace a simple subpart(possessing the design requirements of shape and location information) in the current design model with an existing reusable subpart having a similar shape as the simple subpart but more complex. To enable the reusable subpart to smartly adapt itself to the design requirements implied by the simple subpart, a novel automatic adaptation reuse method for subparts is proposed. First, to determine the corresponding faces between the two subparts as their relevant elements, a seed face filter method is adopted. Second, to explicitly represent the parametric shape dimensions and location information of a subpart, a 3D dimension constraint graph with location information is adopted. Finally, based on the corresponding face and the 3D dimension constraint graph, the reusable subpart automatically and accurately adapts its shape and location information to those of the simple subpart through dimension transferring and constraint transferring respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for subpart reuse based part design.