REPRESENTATION OF FUNCTIONS AND FEATURES IN DETAIL DESIGN

Due to incomplete representation schemes of products and components at the detail design stage, most of the design tasks can only be perform ed by experienced designers. The problems associated with the represen tation schemes include the description of requirements, functions, tol erances, features, as well as relations among them. In this paper, cla ssification of function and feature relations is proposed. Graph theor y is used to represent the function feature relations as well as their inter-relations. The representation scheme proposed offers a foundati on for further development and integration of the design system. Copyr ight (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd