Context dependent extraction of volumetric features

As entities for describing products, features are commonly conceived as being of a semantically higher level than the purely geometric elements traditionally used in CAD systems. Thus, they constitute an effective means for the designer and process planner to consider objects in terms of entities that are meaningful for their activities. The greatest difficulty in using feature technology is the dependence of features on the specific context, i.e. features in one context may be meaningless in another. In this paper, a method for recognizing and deriving volumetric features from boundary representations is presented. The main advantage of this method is the possibility it provides for deriving different feature-based descriptions of the same part by considering the environment used and the degree of multiple interpretation required by the user.