Solid models are the critical data elements in modern computer-aided design (CAD) environments, describing the shape and form of manufactured artifacts. Their growing ubiquity has created new problems in how to effectively manage the many models that are now stored in the digital libraries of large design and manufacturing enterprises. Existing techniques from the engineering literature and from industrial practice, such as group technology, rely on human-supervised encoding and classification, while techniques from the multimedia database and computer graphics/vision communities often ignore the manufacturing attributes most significant in the classification of models.

This paper presents our approach to the manufacturing similarly assessment of solid models of mechanical parts based on machining features. Our technical approach is three-fold: (1) perform machining feature extraction to map the solid model to a set of STEP AP 224 machining features; (2) construct a model dependency graph from the set of machining features; and (3) find the nearest neighbors to the query graph using an iterative improvement search across a database of other models. We also present empirical experiments to validate our approach using our testbed, the National Design Repository.

The contribution of this research is the first fully automated technique for machining feature-based comparisons of mechanical artifacts. We believe that this work can lead to radical changes in the way in which design data is managed in modern engineering enterprises.