This paper analyzes the impact of 3D model annotations on CAD user productivity in the context of the New Product Development Process. These annotations can provide valuable information to support an improved design intent communication. Comparably, they can play the same role as source code comments to support code maintainability in software engineering. A 3D CAD model is a geometry representation and it also stores the modeling strategy used to build it. Alteration of a complex CAD model usually represents a time consuming task due to the lack of an explicit explanation of the design rationale followed to build that 3D model. An experimental study conducted with Spanish and Mexican CAD students indicates that it is possible to reduce the time needed to perform engineering changes in existing models by between 13–26% by using annotations. Also some factors that affect the impact of annotations on the engineering change process such as part and alteration complexity were identified.
The long term goals of this research are to study the effectiveness of CAD 3D annotation techniques to support the explicit communication of design intent and rationale, and to analyze the impact of the annotations in the alteration and reutilization of 3D models in a product design context. Towards these goals, we are initially examining the formal annotation practices defined by model-based standards such as ASME Y14.41-2012 and ISO 16792:2006, and their implementation in current CAD systems. This paper presents a prototype implementation of a module to automatically extract textual information from annotated 3D CAD models. Automated extraction of data annotation can be used to analyze both the content and the quality of the annotations with the purpose of determining what makes annotations effective and ultimately communicating design intent. The architecture of a system designed to manage and manipulate this information is also described and analyzed.
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