A CAD DATA STRUCTURE TO FACILITATE CHANGE

Amongst the established advantages of CAD is the ease of making change s. However, making one change usually has further implications bur mos t existing systems are unable to assist with these changes unless an e xplicit link is established during the development of the design. This paper identifies different classes of change and proposes a data stru cture which incorporates relational operators to capture the relations hips between the model components. These spatial relationships are acq uired directly as the model is constructed and are used to identify th e implications of a change and to suggest a possible implementation of them, based on design intent.