Features as an Abstraction for Designer Convenience in the Design of Ships

Abstract

This paper reports on a research effort involving design of a class of ships — nuclear submarines. It focuses on the use of features as a means of design abstraction, and it is found that a principal motivation for the use of features in this design environment is the convenience of the early stage submarine designer. To support this argument, a review of feature research is presented. Experiments in the development of feature catalogs are described, and implementation through two generations of feature‐based submarine CAD systems are discussed. The architecture of the feature‐based submarine CAD systems includes the use of Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), the ACIS geometric modeler, and user interfaces which store/recall hierarchical submarine feature information easily. Strong connections to object‐oriented programming and object‐oriented databases are recognized. Conclusions are drawn regarding the use of features for ship designer convenience and regarding support provided by hierarchical, parameterized features for other means of design automation.

Enhancing Virtual Product Representations for Advanced Design Repository Systems

“…Summers [2] reports on a knowledge system designed for CAD-based feature elements with the intent of supporting designer activities. Although the modeling approach between the described CAD-based feature system and a functional-based representation system are different, both capture relevant design information.…”

Representing Functionality to Support Reuse: Conceptual and Supporting Functions

“…Summers [1] reports on a feature based knowledge system designed for CAD based feature elements with the intent of supporting designer activities. As conceptual designers, features are crucial pieces of modeling information.…”

“…The primary class and secondary fl ow terms are shown in Table 2. The tertiary level is omitted from Tables 1 and 2 for reasons of brevity, and can be found in [1].…”

“…A function/fl ow string in our repository system refers to the input artifact, input fl ow, subfunction, output fl ow and output artifact. Assigning a Boolean value to each string provides notation to denote whether the function/fl ow strings are standard function/fl ow strings (0) or a supporting function function/fl ow string (1).…”