Automated Propagation of Design Intent from Legacy Drawings to 3D Models

Companies looking to supplant 2D drawings with intelligent 3D models face the problem that there are no tools available that capture more than the geometry of the artifact. The available tools do not propagate the large amount of design intent and manufacturing knowledge contained in 2D drawings such as the notes, dimensions, tolerances, constraints, material, surface finish, contextual information etc. Much research exists in capturing design intent and a number of systems and representation schemas have been developed e.g. JANUS, ADD+, IBIS etc, but these tools do not address capturing same from 2D drawings. With this SBIR Imagecom proposes to research and address the issues that arise when identifying and capturing said intent from 2D engineering drawings and of storing captured intent in a homogeneous format such as the 3D model. Additionally popular CAD/CAE systems will be benchmarked so that one may be extended to serve as the platform to store the captured design intent and manufacturing knowledge. We will prototype an architecture to help address the issue of intent capture with minimal interference to the design. The result of the first phase of this SBIR would be a strategy and architecture to capture, represent, store and retrieve design intent from 2D drawings.