CONVERSIONS OF FEATURE-BASED DESIGN REPRESENTATIONS USING GRAPH GRAMMAR PARSING

In order to trade off required functionality with manufacturing, cost, and other life-cycle considerations, it is necessary to evaluate desi gns in these secondary view-points. Representations of mechanical comp onents designed with design features must be converted into representa tions containing relevant secondary viewpoint features. When describin g a design verbally, designers often use languages of design features. In other viewpoints, different languages of viewpoint-specific featur es are used. Thus, translation capability between viewpoint languages is needed to convert from one representation to another. The approach taken here is to use formal graph grammars to define the feature-based design of thin-walled components and the secondary feature languages. Features are defined by graphs that explicitly represent. the feature , its geometric entities, and their connectivity. Components are built up by combining feature graphs based on designer specified feature co nnectivity. To convert from the design to a secondary viewpoint, a thr ee-step process is used where the last step is parsing by a grammar fr om the secondary viewpoint. To illustrate the conversion process, a co nverter for tool cost evaluation in injection molding and die casting is developed and applied to an example component.