A semantic database approach for tilings

An effort to develop computer programs that can assist or support the design process of manufacturing products having tiling structure is described. The main concept is to have a library of generic graphic programs that generate pictures of repeating patterns independently of their applications and then to modify them according to their given design task. The problem of finding feasible tilings is complex and computationally intensive. Thus, several heuristic approaches have been proposed in the literature. An efficient approach is to store constraints and graphic patterns for all known tilings in a database and use this information to simplify the feasibility problem of a new tiling. A group of constraints specifies the criteria that bound the corresponding tiling pattern. A semantic binary model is chosen to represent the graphic patterns, constraints, and relationships among them. The choice of this model is based on its unambiguous logical representation and its efficient access to data. The authors present a logical schema design to specify the information about known tilings in the database