CAD data exchange based on the recovery of feature modelling procedure

Feature-based data exchange (FBDE) among CAD systems is one of the most important problems in collaborative product development. In this article, we present a procedure recovery-based solution for FBDE. The main difference between our solution and previous approaches is that a peer-to-peer architecture is adopted and the feature modelling procedure is recovered to retrieve the information that exists in the procedure. Our approach is composed of three key steps. First, in a source CAD system, first-order feature information is retrieved from a feature model. Then, the retrieved first-order feature information is used to recover the feature modelling procedure in the source CAD system and second-order feature information is retrieved during the procedure recovery. Finally, in a target CAD system, the feature model is reconstructed by using the retrieved information. The prototype implementation demonstrates that our approach works well for FBDE among various commercial CAD systems and improves the previous approaches in both the architecture and the retrieval of the procedure.