Development of an Intelligent Design Information Management System

The US Army is currently faced with a serious obstcale in its effort to undertake rapid and cost efficient upgrade of its weapons platforms due to the inability of CAD applications to archive and retrieve existing design information. This inability is mainly due to the lack of an archival system to store important design information and inadequacy of available technologies in allowing efficient access to the inventory of design data on parts, components and assemblies stored in disparate systems and formats and . Imaginestics' proposes to research and develop a Design Reuse Management System (DRMS) that will fulfill the Army's needs for Design Reuse and will deliver the following: An Archival Technology "i-Archive" which will allow the designer to archive Geometrical Design Knowledge and Function and Specification Design Knowledge using shape-based retrieval of 3D geometric data and by integrating partial NLP techniques and Ontology representations. An Integrated Design Search Technology "i-Search" using Geometric Query Processing and Function and Specification/Text Query Processing. As a part of the option, we propose to continue further development of the capability of the 3DShape Search engine to identify matching interfaces with a view to promote interchangeability of parts within a product family and across platforms.