Integration of know-how in CAD/CAM systems: a way to improve the design process

This paper addresses a novel approach for modeling a product and its design process, with a high level of abstraction, taking into account the know-how and the knowledge of the different skills involved in the design process. This approach, called conceptual modeling, offers all the facilities to design in terms of concepts manipulated by the designer. The intents of the designer are translated in terms of design operations associated with parameterized operations that are captured in a symbolic model representing the design methodology. This model is interactively interpreted by the system to build all the viewpoints of the product used by the skills. We present a knowledge-based CAD/CAM system organized around a rule base and an operation base, and dedicated to multi-task applications. It offers the user all the facilities for interactively designing a product and for controlling the result at each step of the process