Validity maintenance in semantic feature modeling

Feature modeling is increasingly being used for modeling products. One of its main advantages over conventional geometric modeling techniques is the ability to associate functional and engineering information to shape information in a product model. This can be, for example, the function of some part of the product for the end-user, or information about the way some part of the product is manufactured. The basic entity in a feature model is the feature, defined as a repre-sentation of shape aspects of a product that are mappable to a generic shape and are functionally significant for some product life-cycle phase. Typical examples of features are holes, slots and protrusions. All essential element of a feature is thus that it has a well-defined meaning, or semantics, in a particular context or life-cycle activity. Con-sequently, to build and maintain a feature model, feature-based modeling systems require considerably more advanced facilities than conventional geometric modeling systems, which manage shape information only. Two important aspects of the above definition are not well covered by most current feature-based modeling systems. First, feature semantics is poorly defined, inevitably limiting the capability of capturing design in-tent in the model. Second, feature semantics is poorly maintained, per-mitting previous explicit design intent to be overruled. One of the main reasons for this is that such systems are still too tied to methods and techniques of conventional geometric modeling, e.g. they strongly rely on a history-based approach of the modeling process. This thesis addresses various problems concerning the specification and preservation of feature semantics in a feature model, generally called validity maintenance. This chapter first briefly introduces validity maintenance issues in feature modeling, outlining the main problems that motivated this re-search (Section 1.1). Next, it presents the main research goals of the work described in this thesis (Section L2). The chapter closes with an outline of the thesis (Section 1.3).

@PhdThesis { Bid99,
  author       = "Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Validity maintenance in semantic feature modeling",
  school       = "Delft University of Technology",
  month        = "may",
  year         = "1999",
  address      = "Delft, The Netherlands",
  note         = "ISBN 90-9012599-X",
  type         = "phdthesis",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/1999/Bid99"
}